I fed the abstract into an AI with the prompt:

  can you give me a critique of https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16291 from the point of view of a functional programmer who is skeptical

and I liked the answer. I won't post it here, because I think AI answers are generally noise and quite tiresome, but there is one sentence which stuck in my mind:

  The extraordinary breadth of the claims calls for an extraordinary level of rigor in the proofs.

In the spirit of equality, I then posed this prompt:

  can you give me a critique of __https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16291__ from the point of view of a imperative programmer who wants to believe

Which resulted in the exactly opposite emotion (in me as a reader. The machine does not have emotion. It's statistics)

However, this sentence also did appeal, in a strongly pragmatic sense:

  My ask to the author would be simple: show me a real, ugly, 500-line configuration or dependency-injection problem, solved cleanly in Overlay. If that holds up, I'm a convert.

I am btw, NOT a functional programmer. But, I am skeptical. And, I suspect I won't be a convert, no matter how pragmatic I feel.

The answers were quite long and detailed. I used claude.