Cover unveiled soon!

Andrew's first programming language was Python, whose comunity he fell in love with over the course of making the book. In July 2023 he was invited to deliver a keynote speech to the EuroPython conference in Prague, Czechia. He also gave an emotional world premier preview reading from Devil in the Stack.

Watch the keynote here

Coming soon!

Devil in the Stack: Searching for the Soul of the New Machine


Arriving August 2024 from Grove Atlantic

From internationally-bestselling author and journalist Andrew Smith, an immersive, sharp-eyed, at times alarming journey into the bizarre world of computer code, told through his painful and often comic attempt to become a coder himself.

Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the technology transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can’t see it, are not even sure how to think about it, yet we do almost nothing that doesn’t depend on it. And while our new encoded world contains many marvels, it has also caused or exacerbated potentially civilization-ending problems.

To find out why, Smith embeds himself in the vibrant Python programming language community, has his brain scanned by cognitive scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Germany and MIT in Boston, and pays a reflective visit to the wartime codebreaking factory at Bletchley Park in England. He unpacks the lives of the extraordinary people who breathed life into the machines with uncanny logic, from the poor cobbler's son George Boole and his contemporary Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, through to the present day. He lives among and even works with the coders of Silicon Valley; finds himself witness to a heated insider debate between Big Tech AI engineers and academics skeptical of their work; is unsettled by a strange encounter with coders at Google.

Expansive and effervescent, Devil in the Stack is a kind of digital whodunnit, delivering a portrait of code culture as both staggering act of invention and evolving threat. Could there be something about the way we compute—about the way code works—that is innately at odds with how humans have evolved to live? By turns revelatory, foreboding and joyously funny, Devil in the Stack is an essential literary nonfiction book for our times, in the tradition of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or Smith's own Moondust, comparable to the first 1970s warnings about the internal combustion engine and of vital interest to anyone hoping to participate in the future-defining technological debates to come.