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Her Is Real Now
I saw Her in college and thought it was sweet. Lonely guy falls for the voice in his computer. It knows his calendar, runs his errands, grows a little soul, breaks his heart. Science fiction. Cute. I filed it under Maybe In My Lifetime and went back to whatever I was doing (I was addicted to Dota 2 at the time).
Reader, it is my lifetime. It got here early and it got here fast. Not just because people are having entire relationships with a chatbot (do not go in there sober). Because the whole setup now costs about as much as a free trial you forgot to cancel, and like that free trial you don't think about it once, right up until the morning it does something unspeakable to your credit card.
I gave a local AI agent the keys to my apartment so I could text it to cool the place down before I got home. It said sure. Then, over one summer night while I slept, it set 273 million tokens on fire staring at the sky. What follows is the truth, mostly, told the only way it makes sense to me. Like a heist.
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Life Without Fable
Yesterday I wanted to refactor the check-in kiosk for my silly membership loyalty platform for my bookstore. I had planned to use Fable to deal with it, but we all know how that ended. Z.ai's GLM-5.2 had been generating a lot of buzz so I wanted to try it out on what I believe to be a big one-shot task I'd normally hand to Fable. By the end of the day I'd burned through over $40 of tokens trying to find a decent provider for GLM-5.2 and get set up to code with it. Here's how it went.
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Bicycle
In 2009 an Italian designer named Gianluca Gimini started asking people to draw a bicycle from memory. He kept doing it for years, collecting hundreds of drawings. Most of them were wrong. People would put the chain on the front wheel, or connect the handlebars directly to the rear axle, or draw frames that were physically impossible to ride. These were people who had seen and ridden bicycles their entire lives. Some of them biked to work. They could recognize a bicycle instantly, pick their own bike out of a rack of fifty, tell you the difference between a road bike and a mountain bike. They just couldn't reconstruct one from the parts up.
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The Day I Knew I Existed
My earliest memory as a child was walking home in the evening with my mom, through a street market. I was four years old, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. My shoes didn't fit well and I was tired. I had become fixated on a toy robot a vendor was selling: a battery-operated red robot with dials and lights. I remember distinctly thinking: this robot is not alive, but I am.
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Don't Ask Your Co-Founder to Sign an NDA
As someone with both technical engineering experience and product design experience in the startup world, I regularly receive outreach from first-time founders and aspiring entrepreneurs. These conversations follow a predictable pattern that's worth examining, particularly given how the recent AI boom has amplified certain misconceptions about building high-growth tech companies.