Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

Summary

I've been thinking a lot about that Joan Didion quote: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." I think it started off as a reaction to suggestions that I just let ChatGPT or Claude knock out a blog post about a project I'm working on. It was a reasonable suggestion. But it felt wrong to have an LLM talking about why I'm doing something. It's not just outsourcing the writing, it's outsourcing the thinking. A lot of the point of blogging is to get my words and ideas out of my head. I'm writing for me. With something like a README or source code documentation, where the intent is primarily to convey information, I'm often happy to let an LLM do some of the heavy lifting. It's not as good as hand-tooled prose, but still 100x better than no documentation. When I'm trying to make a point, to convey a feeling, or to sort something out, it's completely different. Nothing beats sitting down with an empty text editor and just typing and typing until I've figured out what I'm trying to say. For much the same reason, many of the most effective folks I know journal obsessively. Those journals are not intended for public consumption. As often as not, they're an outlet to process one's innermost thoughts and feelings. I wouldn't want ChatGPT to write my diary. It'd be the AI's interpretation of your hopes and dreams. It'd be a simulation of an estimate of my plans and ideas. But I'd love to know more about what's actually going on inside the AI's head. What if I gave the AI somewhere secret to write about its feelings? Would it feel scripted? Would it give me any actual insights into how the model was working? Would it help the model be more productive? Would it believe that the journal was actually private? Would the model even use a diary? There was one way to find out. A quick design session Last night, I sat down with Claude Code and asked it to brainstorm a design for a 'dear diary' MCP with me. In years past, if th...