Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever.
Confession time: I don’t.
I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or sending emails for me.
But really because of two fears:
- Data security. I’m cautious of something that can non-deterministically execute and get tricked into emailing confidential info or accidentally delete old photos without me noticing.
- Psychic integrity – I’ll say more about this in a bit.
So I’m a scaredy cat, whatever. Those concerns have kept me away.
Well, you know, concerns go out the window when you have your back against the wall? Last weekend, that’s what happened.
I’m shipping clocks.
Yes, finally, I know. It’s been a journey. I’m really grateful for the support and the patience of all my backers.
But, you know, 700 have left the warehouse in Hong Kong, and 640 or so have been delivered. The rest are in transit.
And last weekend…
Well, I’d shipped out 120 or so mainly to the UK and the US and everything had gone fine, very smooth.
I think I had two or three queries from US customs about import clearance and they just wanted a bit more information about the package. I filled in an online web form with a longer description than on the commercial invoice.
Shipping paused because the warehouse ran out of bubblewrap or something. That’s on me.
Then the next 500+ went out and I woke up on Saturday morning to 15 requests from FedEx for extra docs for customs clearance.
Ok that’s fine, I thought, percentage-wise this is approx the same.
So I started going through the requests. It wasn’t the simple text fields on the web this time. FedEx needed a worksheet. A worksheet is a detailed PDF that you have to complete, and they decide whether import is allowed based on that information.
The clock worksheet is not so bad. But it needs to have the tracking number at the top of the PDF, so it’s a different file for every package.
You go to the FedEx website which is arcane. Then you click around, upload the PDF, and you wait a few days and then the package clears customs and is on its way.
While I’m doing these 15 worksheets, which was the expected number, another 15 emails arrived.
I always do my best to embody the three virtues of a great programmer which are, according to Larry Wall
- Laziness
- Impatience
- Hubris.
So I figured that although it wasn’t taking too long to edit these forms, adding the tracking number to each, it would be appropriately lazy to spend essentially the same amount of time (a little more actually) to make a Claude Code skill where I type /toolbox:make-clock-worksheet <tracking> and the PDF is created and opened on my desktop so I can drag and drop it into the website.
SIDE NOTE: I have a private repo on GitHub which is my personal Claude Code plug-in called toolbox. It has all my custom skills and I can sync them between my machines and I improve them over time. Everyone should do this.
I woke up the next morning and another hundred queries had arrived.
I don’t know what kind of flag had gone off in FedEx internal systems but I think they believe I am smuggling watches or something. Because all the questions about my clock are like, ok so what kind of movement does your so-called “clock” have and how big is the movement (btw it’s not a clock unless it’s bigger than X by Y) and yeah so this “clock” how many jewels does it have.
Jewels? My clock has no jewels. Watches often have jewels, right? Watches are a great way to plausibly move value across borders. No kidding the Swiss have private banks and premium watches, a coincidence I’m sure.
(I have since been informed that jewels in watches are actually tiny and used mechanically as bearings so (a) TIL and (b) apologies for unnecessarily disparaging Switzerland.)
Anyway so I have to officially declare that these packages are not watches, they’re clocks, but I have a hundred of these things to fill in.
It is at this point that I realise what a freight forwarder is for.
But it’s just me, and I’ve got to get through these forms, and it’s a long holiday weekend, and I am seriously not going to be grinding through FedEx’s website for the next two days.
I gave in, I had to:
Claude Code, here you go, have my Gmail.
Claude Code, here you go, drive a web browser without me even looking.
Then I built an agent to process my email, navigating the FedEx website and uploading worksheets for me when that was the request (all the requests are subtly different), replying to emails from humans and attaching the worksheet when that was what had to happen.
I started conservatively, human-in-the-loop as you’re supposed to do, centaur-style, checking the drafts, but there isn’t the time. I admit it. I surrendered.
And then Monday, the holiday day itself, was pleasant in the end.
My family left for a few days. I sat in the garden in the sun washing down the bbq keeping half an eye on my agent as it worked its way through my inbox autonomously. What a life! Idyllic.
What I hadn’t quite internalised about personal agents is that they’re slow.
So time-elapsed is more but time-attended is lower.
It’s an odd kind of efficiency and doubly relaxing.
So it turns out I have a personal AI agent now.
Or at least the beginnings of the kind I am ok with.
Although it can send email on my behalf, which risks my data, I haven’t crossed the Rubicon to that psychic risk I mentioned before which would be allowing it to read and write into my notes.
My notes.
Let me tell you my theory about AI psychosis.
A lot of people keep a lot of notes.
I keep a lot of notes too, that’s how I write this blog, and in particular I like the serendipity of running across old ideas in my own notes – that’s common for other people too (2021).
We used to call it having an outboard brain and it’s true, I think for a certain kind of person, your notes become part of your extended cognition, and you “know something” whether that knowledge is within your skull or within your notes, same same, it’s just a matter of look-up latency.
My theory is that allowing something else to write into your notes does something bad to your psyche.
I had a glimpse of this: a few years ago I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in my style. (This was before chat could browse the web; my blog is well represented in the training data.)
It was pretty good so I pasted it into my notes as a record (but never posted it of course). I got scared off using ChatGPT to help with my blog pretty early when I was talking through an editing decision and it came up with a turn of phrase that was so perfect and so unique that I couldn’t resist it. But it didn’t represent any thinking that I had done to arrive at it, this perfect metaphor, so it wouldn’t bear my weight when I leant on it. Those two experiences terrified me.
Anyway so recently I was browsing my drafts folder and I ran across the bottom half of this fake blog post without noticing the context at the top, and it was like when the elevator drops faster than you’re expecting because I read these words but they didn’t feel buttressed with even a glimmer of memory in my head, so I was gaslighting myself – had I really written that note? I mean there it is, it sounds like me, but I can’t think around those words.
The feeling of not being able to trust the permanence and integrity of the physical world around you is one thing.
Not being able to trust what’s going on in your own mind is another.
Am I the same person as I was yesterday?
So unnerving.
All of which to say is that, for me, my personal theory is that AI psychosis comes from undermining your intrinsic faith in the workings of your own self.
And that comes from allowing an LLM that speaks in your voice to potentially write into your notes which, for a certain kind of person, is part of cognition itself. The AI doesn’t need to actually change your notes, the potential is enough.
Which eventually makes you go loopy.
So I have this fear of risking my own psychic integrity, which has so far kept me away from allowing a personal agent to run on my own machine – I love automation but at a healthy arm’s length…
Yet needs must. And here we are. All it took was 100 emails requesting 100 custom PDFs.
I’ve opened the door and now it’s the slippery slope. The slope ends with outsourcing consciousness itself, and the prospect of humanity becoming a population of voluntary p-zombies is a high-probability eschaton that I’ve talked about before.
I’m making a note here to
- record my feelings at this moment: how naive will this look in a year or two?
- celebrate 640 or so clocks in people’s homes, more in transit, and 300 online right this second.
For both: thank you FedEx.
Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever.
Confession time: I don’t.
I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or sending emails for me.
But really because of two fears:
So I’m a scaredy cat, whatever. Those concerns have kept me away.
Well, you know, concerns go out the window when you have your back against the wall? Last weekend, that’s what happened.
I’m shipping clocks.
Yes, finally, I know. It’s been a journey. I’m really grateful for the support and the patience of all my backers.
But, you know, 700 have left the warehouse in Hong Kong, and 640 or so have been delivered. The rest are in transit.
And last weekend…
Well, I’d shipped out 120 or so mainly to the UK and the US and everything had gone fine, very smooth.
I think I had two or three queries from US customs about import clearance and they just wanted a bit more information about the package. I filled in an online web form with a longer description than on the commercial invoice.
Shipping paused because the warehouse ran out of bubblewrap or something. That’s on me.
Then the next 500+ went out and I woke up on Saturday morning to 15 requests from FedEx for extra docs for customs clearance.
Ok that’s fine, I thought, percentage-wise this is approx the same.
So I started going through the requests. It wasn’t the simple text fields on the web this time. FedEx needed a worksheet. A worksheet is a detailed PDF that you have to complete, and they decide whether import is allowed based on that information.
The clock worksheet is not so bad. But it needs to have the tracking number at the top of the PDF, so it’s a different file for every package.
You go to the FedEx website which is arcane. Then you click around, upload the PDF, and you wait a few days and then the package clears customs and is on its way.
While I’m doing these 15 worksheets, which was the expected number, another 15 emails arrived.
I always do my best to embody the three virtues of a great programmer which are, according to Larry Wall
So I figured that although it wasn’t taking too long to edit these forms, adding the tracking number to each, it would be appropriately lazy to spend essentially the same amount of time (a little more actually) to make a Claude Code skill where I type
/toolbox:make-clock-worksheet <tracking>and the PDF is created and opened on my desktop so I can drag and drop it into the website.SIDE NOTE: I have a private repo on GitHub which is my personal Claude Code plug-in called
toolbox. It has all my custom skills and I can sync them between my machines and I improve them over time. Everyone should do this.I woke up the next morning and another hundred queries had arrived.
I don’t know what kind of flag had gone off in FedEx internal systems but I think they believe I am smuggling watches or something. Because all the questions about my clock are like, ok so what kind of movement does your so-called “clock” have and how big is the movement (btw it’s not a clock unless it’s bigger than X by Y) and yeah so this “clock” how many jewels does it have.
Jewels? My clock has no jewels. Watches often have jewels, right? Watches are a great way to plausibly move value across borders. No kidding the Swiss have private banks and premium watches, a coincidence I’m sure.
(I have since been informed that jewels in watches are actually tiny and used mechanically as bearings so (a) TIL and (b) apologies for unnecessarily disparaging Switzerland.)
Anyway so I have to officially declare that these packages are not watches, they’re clocks, but I have a hundred of these things to fill in.
It is at this point that I realise what a freight forwarder is for.
But it’s just me, and I’ve got to get through these forms, and it’s a long holiday weekend, and I am seriously not going to be grinding through FedEx’s website for the next two days.
I gave in, I had to:
Claude Code, here you go, have my Gmail.
Claude Code, here you go, drive a web browser without me even looking.
Then I built an agent to process my email, navigating the FedEx website and uploading worksheets for me when that was the request (all the requests are subtly different), replying to emails from humans and attaching the worksheet when that was what had to happen.
I started conservatively, human-in-the-loop as you’re supposed to do, centaur-style, checking the drafts, but there isn’t the time. I admit it. I surrendered.
And then Monday, the holiday day itself, was pleasant in the end.
My family left for a few days. I sat in the garden in the sun washing down the bbq keeping half an eye on my agent as it worked its way through my inbox autonomously. What a life! Idyllic.
What I hadn’t quite internalised about personal agents is that they’re slow.
So time-elapsed is more but time-attended is lower.
It’s an odd kind of efficiency and doubly relaxing.
So it turns out I have a personal AI agent now.
Or at least the beginnings of the kind I am ok with.
Although it can send email on my behalf, which risks my data, I haven’t crossed the Rubicon to that psychic risk I mentioned before which would be allowing it to read and write into my notes.
My notes.
Let me tell you my theory about AI psychosis.
A lot of people keep a lot of notes.
I keep a lot of notes too, that’s how I write this blog, and in particular I like the serendipity of running across old ideas in my own notes – that’s common for other people too (2021).
We used to call it having an outboard brain and it’s true, I think for a certain kind of person, your notes become part of your extended cognition, and you “know something” whether that knowledge is within your skull or within your notes, same same, it’s just a matter of look-up latency.
My theory is that allowing something else to write into your notes does something bad to your psyche.
I had a glimpse of this: a few years ago I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in my style. (This was before chat could browse the web; my blog is well represented in the training data.)
It was pretty good so I pasted it into my notes as a record (but never posted it of course). I got scared off using ChatGPT to help with my blog pretty early when I was talking through an editing decision and it came up with a turn of phrase that was so perfect and so unique that I couldn’t resist it. But it didn’t represent any thinking that I had done to arrive at it, this perfect metaphor, so it wouldn’t bear my weight when I leant on it. Those two experiences terrified me.
Anyway so recently I was browsing my drafts folder and I ran across the bottom half of this fake blog post without noticing the context at the top, and it was like when the elevator drops faster than you’re expecting because I read these words but they didn’t feel buttressed with even a glimmer of memory in my head, so I was gaslighting myself – had I really written that note? I mean there it is, it sounds like me, but I can’t think around those words.
The feeling of not being able to trust the permanence and integrity of the physical world around you is one thing.
Not being able to trust what’s going on in your own mind is another.
Am I the same person as I was yesterday?
So unnerving.
All of which to say is that, for me, my personal theory is that AI psychosis comes from undermining your intrinsic faith in the workings of your own self.
And that comes from allowing an LLM that speaks in your voice to potentially write into your notes which, for a certain kind of person, is part of cognition itself. The AI doesn’t need to actually change your notes, the potential is enough.
Which eventually makes you go loopy.
So I have this fear of risking my own psychic integrity, which has so far kept me away from allowing a personal agent to run on my own machine – I love automation but at a healthy arm’s length…
Yet needs must. And here we are. All it took was 100 emails requesting 100 custom PDFs.
I’ve opened the door and now it’s the slippery slope. The slope ends with outsourcing consciousness itself, and the prospect of humanity becoming a population of voluntary p-zombies is a high-probability eschaton that I’ve talked about before.
I’m making a note here to
For both: thank you FedEx.