I was wondering how she wrote such convincing technical detail for Murderbot’s data wrangling and hacking. This interview explains:

What most of my experience comes from is when I graduated from college, I worked as a programmer doing system management, creating databases and making interfaces with databases for users and that kind of stuff. It’s all in my experience in software. So that’s what I drew on in the end: I worked for a software company for a while.

So basically, the frustration of getting different updates, the update that destroys everything because it wasn’t quite finished, and the way an AI or any intelligence would work with databases to figure out what it’s supposed to do and how it’s supposed to organize its thoughts. It all came from my experience as a programmer.