Awwww yeah original Dune on Hulu.

Have I told you about how Dune is a great example of why you don’t plan too far ahead in any project?

So the Bene Gesserit are ninja space nuns. They train for years, are contracted out as concubines to the ruling class as part of a generations-long breeding program, and eventually, they take a drug that opens up their maternal memories. But they can't see the paternal memories.

The goal of their breeding program is to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, which is a male version of them who can see BOTH maternal and paternal lines back. But one they can control, because they want to use his power for their own plans.

So they spend all this time planning, matchmaking, and controlling who has girls and who has boys...right up until Jessica catches some real feels, and decides to give Duke Leto Atreides a son, when she was meant to only give him daughters.

So the Bene Gesserit are PISSED, this is not what she was supposed to do and now there's no daughter to marry off to the Harkonnens' to forge peace. The plan is FUCKED. A whole war is going to go off all because Jessica switched out one X for a Y!

The Bene Gesserit come to see if Paul Atreides is worth salvaging, and maybe pair up with some other family. They test him, and find out they're getting damn strong biz in this boy, but they say he's not the Kwisatz Haderach. Of course, now Paul is curious about all this stuff.

His family moves to Arakis, where they produce Spice: the drug that enables space travel, and turns Bene Gesserit into their final form. He starts poking about. Meets the Fremen, learns some culture, fits in better than anyone expected!

The Harkonnens start that war, and Leto gets killed and Paul and Jessica end up with the Fremen. He learns about Sandworms, and a Fremen messiah whose backstory lines up pretty well with his own if you squint at it. So Paul starts to lean into this messiah shtick.

He's got all this training, and once exposed to enough Spice he gets some visions too. Paul trains the already insanely dangerous Fremen in all his weird fighting styles to fulfill their prophecy. He hooks up with Chani and they have a kid. They take over the planet.

Then Paul decides the Bene Gesserit idea from before is good and picks it up himself...he takes the spice drug to become the Kwisatz Haderach and starts to view the FUTURE. And the future is FUCKED. Like so so bad. And when he sees what's in store, he tries to CHANGE it.

The problem is, every time he changes something he changes all the paths beyond it. Perpetually changing the possible futures. There are too many choices he doesn't control that change the result too. So he goes pretty much completely insane and he wanders off.

His son, Leto, picks up where Paul left off and successfully controls the future SO HARD that he destroys Arakis's ecosystem, beats down the entire population so they despise him, and takes so much Spice he turns LITERALLY, into a giant fucking sandworm.

So Leto, in pursuit of a Perfect Golden Future, made absolutely everything awful, for everyone, for ten thousand years.

And that is what happens when you plan a long-term software project out too far from where you are other than succinct higher-level purposes and goals.

P.S. I love comparing this plot to bad software development because the universe Dune is in is the end result of the Butlerian Jihad, which was basically humans saying “Fuck off forever with all these computers!” to a malevolent sentient AI that ran their society.