Artificial Intelligence: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?
If you are reading the digital version of this story, you have just used a small piece of software from a project called cURL. If you are reading it in print, but you have used a smartphone, laptop or tablet today, you have used cURL. If, somehow, you haven't touched a browser or app, but you've used a modern car, printer, TV or gaming device, you've used cURL. You and the majority of humans on Earth use it several times every day, though only a tiny fraction of its users are aware of its existence.
While online, you are constantly requesting packets of information from other machines. But these requests need to follow specific protocols over destination, routing, format, permission; cURL administers these details. First released in 1996, it is now a piece of the invisible plumbing of the internet, small but prevalent, part of the many thousands of lines of code that run constantly in the background of our digital lives. Its maintainers estimate that its component, libcurl, has been installed more than 20 billion times. Even its admirers are rarely conscious of it as they use it, just as it would be impossible always to consider the pumps that make water flow when we open a sink tap.