An engineer built a small Go program called Perpetual, deployed on AWS Lambda, designed to post 10 pre-written tweets on an exponential schedule spanning up to 10,000 years. The experiment drew inspiration from the Long Now Foundation's Clock of the Long Now, applying its design principles (longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, scalability) to software. The program avoided persistent state, relied on Twitter's API for state management, and used Go's strong backwards compatibility. Despite careful design choices, the experiment ended after 4 years and 8 months when Twitter suspended free API access in 2023. The post reflects on why software rarely outlasts its dependencies and how long-term thinking should inform how we build systems.
