After the shakeoff, a sect of neoshamanists formed known as the Mindseekers. They rejected the Great Commandment as a fool's errand. However, they still clung to the hope that they would one day see bone not of their bone and flesh not of their flesh. Rather than looking for minds among the stars, they chose to create new minds here on terra firma.
Mindseekers played a similar cultural role among yinrih as Terran alchemists–Pursuers of forbidden knowledge. Early Mindseeker attempts at creating sapient life resembled golems or homunculi. They were no more successful at creating life than their human counterparts were at transmuting lead into gold. But just as alchemy blossomed into chemistry, the mindseekers hit their stride as computer scientists when electronics became feasible.
While the Bright Way's research monks stubbornly continued to use analog and mechanical computers in their attempt to reach the stars, the mindseekers were busy jump starting the digital revolution. It wasn't until a former Mindseeker who converted to the Bright Way made an impassioned apologia on behalf of electronic computers that the research monks began incorporating the new tech into their work. This newfound efficiency allowed them to simulate and iterate like never before, which lead to them finally breaching Yih's atmosphere. The Mindseekers never did manage to create life, much less sapient life, but their failures allowed Wayfarers to finally fling themselves into the starry firmament.
The influence of the Mindseekers is still felt at the time of First Contact. Early on, they settled on balanced ternary, not binary, as their number system of choice. Balanced Ternary uses three digits, -1, 0, and 1. This choice stems from their attempts at emulating certain vagaries of yinrih neurology. Numbers in balanced ternary can express any integer, positive or negative, without the use of a negative sign. The sign of a number can be deduced by looking at the highest place value. If it is 1, the number is positive. If it is -1, the number is negative. The sign of a number can be flipped by flipping the 1's to -1's and vice versa, and truncation and rounding are equivalent operations.