Every attempt at it back then met the same fate. All logic had to be hard-coded, by hand, rule by rule — there was no way for the system to generate its own new logic, only to run the logic it had already been given. So nothing ever compounded. No snowball effect. Each experiment was a dead end for the same underlying reason, regardless of how it was designed.

AI-assisted development is what finally removed that ceiling. A solo developer can now cover enough ground, quickly enough, for the old idea to be worth trying again — not because the idea changed, but because the thing that was blocking it did.

Where this shows up

This isn't the origin story of any one project — it's the reason several exist:

• Terminus is the first attempt built after the ceiling lifted: the smallest possible test of a validated self-editing loop, deliberately scoped down to "does the mechanism even work."
• Omega Observer → Omega ACA is the same underlying instinct — systems that change their own structure rather than just executing fixed logic — applied to memory and cognition instead of code.
• Why an LLM Doesn't Have a Will is arguably the same question again, one level up: not "can the code rewrite itself" but "can the system generate its own reasons to act" — a system that isn't just running rules it was given.

A twenty-plus-year-old idea, tried repeatedly and abandoned repeatedly for one consistent, structural reason, isn't the same thing as an idea that was wrong. It just needed a precondition that hadn't arrived yet.