The collie and the pug | HackMIT keynote 2026

Nine minutes, built on one parable. Two dogs are adopted together; the pug tells the border collie his urge to chase is obsolete, since the owners will always feed them, and in old age points out he was right — the collie never once needed to run. The collie answers: “I was not running because that’s what I needed to do to live, I was living to run.” Sanderson’s point is that building something and understanding it used to be coupled, and agentic coding is pulling them apart. As abundance that is remarkable — the only rate limiters left are “your own appreciation for what actually adds value to other people’s lives and maybe your token budget” — but as education it is a loss, because a project used to be the best excuse to learn the principles underneath it. He tells it through his own Manim, the animation library behind 3Blue1Brown, which began at a Stanford hackathon and was never a product: an old car in the garage he tunes for the pleasure of knowing why each pixel is the colour it is. Over the past year the tools got good even at what he is expert in, and he decided that for this one project he would rather go slower and stay the collie. He takes on the objection that English is just another layer of abstraction, like Python over C: you still learn Python better for having written C, and the last jump drops the rigor that every layer of code kept. He declines to make it a verdict on the pug, who might spend his freedom on poetry and mathematics, and asks the room only to choose deliberately. But the collie’s answer reaches past the hackathon. For as long as there have been dogs and people, necessity answered what we did and why; once the food is guaranteed, it stops answering, and each of us is left with the collie’s question — not what we need to do to live, but what we are living for.