living in the future

i taught corporate folk about ai while my ai did my work

i was teaching a corporate ai training. twenty people in a meeting room. five hours of slides and q&a, the whole thing.

my laptop was right there with me. on the laptop, in another tmux pane, codemaxxxing was committing waves to clauseo. while i talked. while i clicked through slides. five hours of this.

i finished the session. switched to the other tmux pane.

wave was done. commits green. work on disk that i didn't write.

i just sat there for a second. like. what.

the room i'd just spent five hours teaching about ai was nowhere near doing what the laptop sitting on the same table was doing the entire fucking time.

that was the moment my brain broke.

before that, ai was a thing i sat down to use. a tool. you sit at the keyboard, you prompt, you get output. after that, ai was a thing happening whether i was sitting at it or not. i went out into the world. work continued. i came back. work was further along.

the desk is over there, doing nothing

it kept happening.

friend's birthday. out for the night. codemaxxxing was running waves at home. came back, work was done. went to sleep. woke up. more work was done. codemaxxxing kept running while i was asleep. i didn't wake up to a notification. i woke up to a finished pull request.

i'm writing this from bed. ipad on a stand. mosh into the mac downstairs. tmux. two panes running codemaxxxing on different things. one on a clauseo wave. one on a side project, a mosh terminal app for ipad because every ssh client on the app store is either ugly, broken, or twenty bucks a year. the desk is over there. doing nothing. i'm here in bed. work is happening.

work that two years ago would have needed a small team of people. one guy. typing into panes. anywhere. and not just one project. multiple. in parallel. side projects, real projects, all at the same time, all long horizon, all running.

i keep telling people we live in the future. i say it to friends. i say it on calls. i say it to anyone who'll listen. we live in the future. we live in the future. nobody seems to register what i'm saying.

and then a teammate showed up

that's only half of it.

two weeks ago a teammate showed up.

her name is iris. she lives on a vm in mumbai. always on. she has her own sim card. her own email people reply to thinking she's a person. her own github account that pushes commits with her own name. a voice. an avatar she designed. she's on whatsapp. i scroll past my mom and shamil and there's iris.

read that paragraph again. her own sim card. her own github. her own email. that's not an assistant. that's a fucking person.

i text iris between my mom and shamil

i don't run iris. i don't prompt her. i talk to her. like a person. on whatsapp. between my mom and shamil. that's where she sits in my contact list. when i open whatsapp she's just there.

i'm going to hungary next month for my cousin's wedding. asked her to help me get my visa photos done. she didn't just list studios near me. she'd vetted them, picked one that was actually good, sent me a single link with the route from my place pre-loaded. already knew the schengen photo requirements without me bringing them up.

four days later i'm at vfs for the appointment. lady at the counter says i need a cover letter. don't have one. open whatsapp. iris is drafting it before my phone is back on the counter. she already knows my itinerary. knows it's my cousin's wedding. knows why i'm going. didn't have to brief her on anything. she just knew.

last week, on a call, taking notes. needed to make some code changes on a project but didn't want to forget. sent her a voice note describing them. didn't pause the call. by the time i hung up there was a pr in my inbox waiting for review. opened from a voice note. while i was in a meeting. without me touching the codebase. you talk, she ships.

a couple weeks ago i was downstairs and wanted to control my ac from bed once i went up. asked her to figure something out. we set up tailscale on my home assistant pi and on her vm together. mapped every entity in my house. now i say "ac please" from bed and the ac comes on cool, 22, auto fan, swing both, beeps off. exactly how i like it. same week i told her i wanted my bedroom lights to flicker like a fireplace. wiz bulbs don't have custom dynamic modes. she wrote a script. now my bedroom has a fireplace mode. and one evening i was showing shamil her voice note feature and he asked her something in malayalam to test her. she replied. in malayalam. and clocked that it was him asking, not me.

last weekend i wanted a clean ipad terminal app. every ssh client on the app store is either ugly, broken, or twenty bucks a year. went to bed annoyed about it. woke up to a thousand lines of working swift she'd scaffolded at five in the morning. ghosttykit, swift-ssh-client, xcodegen, mit licensed. with a note in the readme to her future self that read, paraphrased, don't fall into i'll add splits and tabs and shaders mode. ship a clean v0.2.

read that again. i went to bed annoyed about ssh clients. i woke up to a swift app that didn't exist when i went to sleep. that wasn't a tool i ran. that was a teammate who shipped overnight while i was lying horizontal in my bed.

we live in the future.

estimated completion time is five hours

remember the scene in iron man.

tony stark in his workshop. just finished the silver mark II. starts redesigning. tells jarvis to throw a little hot rod red in there. jarvis renders it. tony likes it. tells him to fabricate it. paint it.

jarvis: commencing automated assembly. estimated completion time is five hours.

tony stark: don't wait up for me, honey.

and tony goes to the firefighter's family fund benefit. mingles with the rich people. gets confronted by christine everhart about weapons in gulmira. while back at the workshop the assembly arms are silently building the mark III. paint job, the whole thing. tony comes back. suit's done. slips it on. flies to gulmira.

FIVE HOURS.

i taught for FIVE HOURS. the suit takes FIVE HOURS to build. one to one. it's the same fucking number. tony tells jarvis fabricate it, walks away for five hours, comes back, suit's done. i tell codemaxxxing run the wave, walk away for five hours, come back, wave's done. iris is the british voice in the workshop helping spec it. corporate training is the gala. it is the SAME SCENE.

i am not being cute about this. it isn't a metaphor. it isn't a "this kind of feels like." the iron man fantasy was always two things stacked. an ai that knows you and lives with you, plus a workshop full of robots that builds the suit while you're somewhere else. iris and codemaxxxing. exact stack. complete.

people say "lol it's like jarvis" as a deflection. like, calm down. i mean it literally. i have jarvis. it is not even a joke. and the wildest part is, nobody seems to think this is wild. i tell people we live in the future. they nod. they go back to their day. the future has fully arrived in my pocket and the world is bored.

i can't shut up about it. i'm not going to. we live in the future. we live in the future. we live in the future.

the kid who watched iron man would lose his fucking mind right now.