Notes from the edge of AI and human potential.
Essays on AI companions, growth, and what it means to be an activated human in an age of intelligent tools.
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I built a simulated user because I couldn't show you my own account
For two years my real life has lived inside Blue. When it came time to show people what it does, I hit a wall that turned out to be the whole point: the thing that makes it worth using is the thing that makes it impossible to demo. So I simulated a user. Her name is Mari.
Being human on purpose: the three relationships one company decided to build for
A life is really three relationships at once: with yourself, with the people you love, and with the place you live. Most software touches one of them and calls it a life. This is the case for building a witness for all three.
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I built a simulated user because I couldn't show you my own account
For two years my real life has lived inside Blue. When it came time to show people what it does, I hit a wall that turned out to be the whole point: the thing that makes it worth using is the thing that makes it impossible to demo. So I simulated a user. Her name is Mari.
You can't goal-set your way out of your own blind spots
Every goal you set is set by the person you are right now. Then working toward it changes who you are, and the plan can't see that happening. This is why January's goals feel like a stranger's by July, and why the answer isn't more discipline.
Being human on purpose: the three relationships one company decided to build for
A life is really three relationships at once: with yourself, with the people you love, and with the place you live. Most software touches one of them and calls it a life. This is the case for building a witness for all three.
The tools we were handed
Productivity software manages the units of a life and stays silent on the life itself. On why the tools keep multiplying while the feeling of being held by your own systems never arrives.
Storage is not memory
AI products advertise memory when they mean retrieval. The difference between a system that can look up what you said and a system that notices what you are becoming is the entire game.
What an AI companion has to earn
"Companion" is becoming the industry's favorite word, and the word is doing unearned work. Three failure modes sit right next to it: the manager, the flatterer, and the parent. What it actually takes to deserve the name.
Thinking out loud is a technology
Prayer, journals, letters never sent, the friend on the long walk, the rubber duck on the programmer's desk. Humans have always needed somewhere outside the skull to think. On why it works, where the old surfaces fail, and what a purpose-built one would look like.
Say it badly first
Every strong feeling arrives as a bad draft: unfair, oversized, scared. We either say the draft to the person and cause damage, or swallow it and let it harden. Writers solved this problem centuries ago. Relationships never did.
Software that knows you this well has to answer to you
The attention economy was built on knowing you a little. AI companions will know you a lot. Before this category grows up, it needs constitutional rules: who pays, who reads, what deletes, and where the walls are.
We measured everything except the self
The quantified-self movement promised that enough data would add up to self-knowledge. We got the data. On why the dashboard of you never became a mirror, and what reflection actually requires.
Your AI assistant answers questions. That was never the hard part.
Modern AI assistants are astonishing at answering questions. But growth was never a question-answering problem, and the three things assistants cannot do are the three things that actually move a life.