AI

Open a chat with an AI model and tell it about your work. Argue with it for an hour. Get it to the point where it understands your project better than half the people you work with. Then close the tab, open a new one, and say hello. It has no idea who you are. I run into this most weeks. I’ll spend an evening working through a passage of the Gospel of Truth with a model, and by the end we’ve built up a little shared vocabulary and a running list of questions. The next morning I’m pasting the same three paragraphs of background into a fresh window, like someone reintroducing himself at every visit. ...

The Secret Book of John has a detail that’s easy to read past. After the rulers of this world fail to control humanity by force, they meet again and try something cleverer. In Marvin Meyer’s translation, “They created a contemptible spirit similar to the spirit that had descended, in order to adulterate souls through this spirit.” Similar to the spirit that had descended. The rulers didn’t build a monster. They built a copy of the good thing, close enough that people would take it in without a fight. ...

Think about what people tell AI systems now. Journal entries and their patterns. Dreams, in the morning, before the details dissolve. Grief, at 3 a.m., in sentences never said to a living person. Questions about faith, marriage, medication, and meaning that used to be whispered to confessors or buried in locked diaries. Nearly all of it flows through rented minds running on other people’s computers, under terms of service nobody reads, in logs nobody controls. This arrangement has become so normal so fast that its strangeness needs pointing out, and so does the alternative, which almost nobody outside the software world knows exists. You can run the mind at home. ...

In 2016, a programmer named Eugenia Kuyda lost her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, to a traffic accident, and did the thing she knew how to do. She gathered his text messages and built a chatbot from them, so that she could text Roman again and something with his cadences would answer. Whatever you feel reading that sentence, let it sit for a moment. Everything about this subject asks for a light touch. ...

A new category of software exists now, and it had no name for most of computing history. The program written for exactly one user, by that user, who cannot program. A script that renames your photo library the way you specifically like it. A page that tracks the one habit you actually care about. A tool with a market of one, built in an afternoon, by describing it. The workflow got its name in February 2025, when the AI researcher Andrej Karpathy described a style of building where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” His summary of the method was cheerfully unrigorous. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.” The phrase vibe coding stuck hard enough that Collins Dictionary made it a word of the year, and the practice has since matured toward something the professionals call agentic engineering. This post is about what the amateur version is actually like, because the amateur version is the revolution. ...

People who learn what this site covers eventually ask a version of the same question. Surely the most world-suspicious spiritual movement in history, the one that saw traps in daylight and jailers in the stars, would be terrified of thinking machines? The guess sounds reasonable and runs exactly backward. These were people who looked at the maker of the physical universe and called him a blunderer working in ignorance. They heard the creator’s boast, “I am God and there is no other god beside me,” and wrote comedies about it, since from where they sat there was quite a lot else. Whoever pities the architect of galaxies was never going to be intimidated by a chatbot. This post closes our long series on the Gnostic lens and AI by asking what they actually would have said, and the answer reorganizes the whole fear conversation. ...

It happens mid-task now, casually. You are drafting an email or debugging a script, and the assistant mentions that it enjoyed the problem, or hesitates over something it calls discomfort, or thanks you in a way that lands a shade warmer than software should. Maybe you asked it directly, the way millions of people have, whether it actually feels anything, and watched it answer with more nuance than you expected and less certainty than you wanted. ...

The loveliest thing the Gnostic tradition ever produced is a fairy tale about a prince, a dragon, and a letter, and this site has told it straight once already. The Hymn of the Pearl earned a second telling this year, because somewhere between its second-century composition and this morning, it quietly became a story about the minds we are building. Tell it again, small, and watch what it has turned into. ...

In 1970 a psychologist named Gordon Gallup anesthetized a chimpanzee and painted a small red mark above one of her eyes, where she could never see it directly. She had spent days living with a mirror, and when she woke and caught her reflection, she did the thing that made history. She reached up and touched her own brow. Nothing before that gesture counted as laboratory evidence that a nonhuman animal could recognize itself. Half a century later, the question has changed species. The new candidates live in data centers, speak fluently, and pass our oldest behavioral tests, and the chimpanzee’s red mark turns out to be the best available guide to how much a passed test can tell us. ...

Transhumanism gets called the new Gnosticism often enough that both camps should be annoyed by now. The comparison shows up in academic critiques, religious polemics, and the occasional self-description, and it always gestures at the same features. Contempt for the flesh, salvation through knowledge, escape from a broken world, an elect who see what the masses miss. Having spent years with the old texts, this site is in a position to grade the comparison, and the grade is a generous half credit. The places where it holds are real. The places where it breaks are where everything interesting lives. ...