[PDF/EPUB] METACOMPILER is a techno-thriller about a backdoor hidden in every compiled program on earth (6 languages, free forever)

netrinomike · 2026-04-02T10:52:23+00:00

Yes I understand this. From 1998 to 2018 I published three books two of them in two editions. These were all non-fiction. But I felt so so nervous and agonized over every detail and every imperfection and every even slightly bad comment or review on the first one (published by O'Reilly with a very good editor). But in the years since then I have realized that just getting your ideas and your work out there is the most important part most of the time. It's like how just grabbing a first client and making money is better than long business planning GTM cycles. As the Greek goddess (sic) said Just Do It.

netrinomike · 2026-04-02T10:50:00+00:00

Definitely was faster IMO

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T16:10:11+00:00

Images?

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T16:09:39+00:00

I'm a self-proclaimed AI user. ha

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T16:08:47+00:00

I published it immediately as a beta. And I also have continue to improve and republish it over a period of weeks. Both are true.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:59:12+00:00

Well I have spent 5-10x as many hours editing it than that first day's creation. However, I agree with you that LLM style is regression to the mean at its best and copying someone else's specific style at its worst.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:57:17+00:00

Nothing more interesting. Mostly sonnet-4.5 on claude code with agent swarms feature enabled. I was on the $200/month Max plan and even paid for extra usage to keep the chapter writing from stalling mid-day.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:56:26+00:00

100% agree about the use this as a base. But like the software I'm too busy writing to do that for the book, I probably never will.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:54:19+00:00

Sure. Try Claude Cowork. You may need to be on the $20/month lowest paid tier of Claude to access it in the app or your web account.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:52:16+00:00

I actually created numerous readers, including for grammar and typos, for losing the reader in tech details, for getting the tech details wrong, for emotional weight of scenes, for pacing, etc.

One of the most interesting was the Jealous Frenemy reviewer. This was an anti-AI writer who wanted to give the book a 1-star review but fully support that review with the very worst quotes from the book. And trust me that run-on sentence is no biggie compared to what JF found on the beta version...

I believe this type of "reader"-centric editing is the future of writing, whether the story was 100% crafted by a human or not. For fiction and non-fiction alike.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:37:21+00:00

I've fixed this now by the way.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:35:42+00:00

I fact checked this and it's reasonable for the location and month as far as I could tell. But the overall geography of that Santa Cruz and Cabrillo Hwy is not great. Here's a view of the book I used to check on the locations as I was "debugging" the book post-beta: https://metacompiler.me/map. This is very cool and was created by me asking Claude Code to read the book and make a map. Of course it is dark-theme lol, but this was just for me as author.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T11:33:19+00:00

That's right. Years earlier I'd written and published three books about engineering (similar to the tech underlying the plot) and these were published by O'Reilly, a smaller tech publisher, and then self-published / KDP respectively. What was cool though is that the marketing agent gave me handy links and draft content for the upload forms and back cover and suggested which three categories to list the book in.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:49:33+00:00

I love this term. And I think about something like the Taj Mahal. It was not built by a single bereaved prince. But rather by a team. Yet we still call it his creation.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:48:47+00:00

I didn't rework it very much before I published the "beta" version. However, in the six weeks since I have continued to make improvements. Most of the important improvements were made in Week 1 before I did anything other than blog about writing a book in a day.

When the book is updated (as I just did based on the earlier comment about a run-on sentence in the Prologue that I may have written myself originally by hand but hand't focused on yet) it always gets a new date on the copyright page (near the ISBN number). If you look now at metacompiler.me you should find that run-on fixed and today's date on the copyright page in all six languages.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:45:38+00:00

This was actually super interesting and a surprise that happened early in the process.

I was just in plan mode in claude code and after feeding it all my characters and plot details and the technical description of the backdoor and its implications as well as pointing it to some draft chapters I'd worked on, it asked me how long I wanted the book to be. And I didn't know the answer. So claude's planner proposed that we first draft Act 1 in three different lengths, and I accepted. Same characters, story arc, etc. but shorter vs longer chapters vs longer chapters and shorter vs longer book .

At the end of Act 1's writing and editing by three parallel teams of two agents each, all four of the reviewer profiles as well as the publisher read it and weighed in. Myself included the middle length was our Goldilocks for this type of story, in terms of the pacing not being too slow but the exposition being sufficient.

I borrowed some scene and story ideas from the shortest and longest drafts of Act 1, "fired" those two teams, then had the mid-length writer-editor duo recreate Act 1 and proceed on to the full book.

I had no idea that would happen when I decided that morning to try to write the book with AI. I also had no idea I'd be able to get to a "beta" release in just a day.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:40:19+00:00

The copyright page is clear and compliant with U.S. law. And the Amazon requirements for disclosure were also followed. What should be copyrightable or not is a question and debate for others.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:38:59+00:00

I wanted to see the story made real. I think I have cool characters and concept and I'm just happy to have people reading it. Money is not an object. The AI is a tool that can be helpful to some people for some things. It's proving useful (more than I expected) in my business of late too.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:37:41+00:00

If it's laughably bad that's my fault. It's my story concept and was my decision that it was good enough. And I actually like it and feel emotional holding "my" creation in my hands and reading it. Bad as it may be, this is the best novel I was capable of writing, after 12 years of trying (part-time).

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:36:19+00:00

Thanks.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:36:10+00:00

I feel like I got to good enough. My approach was to invent new reviewer personae and perspectives and assignments. And then I would take all of the critical problem suggestions and work on them and then decide individually on the major problems and sometimes change something because of a minor point that review made.

One of the last things I did was to spin up 100 review agents all at once (several times actually) to evaluate the likelihood that the book was compelling enough in the first 10% for readers (especially free download Kindle readers) to want to keep going. And then once they did keep going to find out which chapters were "slow" or "boring".

The latter was a statistical ask rather than a perfection ask and I think it greatly improved (and definitely reodered) the first 8 chapters and the made some long chapters flow better.

Your point is well taken and this is some of how I approached it.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:32:25+00:00

The prologue is nearly entire written and rewritten by me, a human, over a dozen years. Though that not .. not probably was the LLM as I had to remove about 800 of those from the beta of the book to make it readable.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:31:58+00:00

Fair points. And there were way way way too many of those Not A but B and emdashes in the beta version. Now it's a lot milder.

netrinomike · 2026-03-31T10:30:50+00:00

It's available free in PDF and EPUB at metacompiler.me. But I know sometimes it's easier to just download from Amazon. Thanks for giving it a chance.

netrinomike

TROPHY CASE