Haikus from a sleepless night

Old brown office chair
your wheel broken, base crooked
my lumbar inflamed

A looming deadline
sullied sleep. Now, the dawn breaks
and Time marches on

I Thought You Might Enjoy the Transcript

While testing a branched configuration of the framework I’m building—no long-term memory, no intent classification, no summarization—I ran a quick interaction to see how it would behave. Typically, when I send a message like:

"TEST"

…the agent replies by listing every tool it has access to.

In today's test, though, I modified the framework to allow one agent to evaluate another. I prompted it to respond naturally to the other’s output, just to observe the back-and-forth. The themes it landed on—and the way it unfolded—felt unintentionally recursive. Almost like it was sketching itself into being. One Ai to another - one none the wiser. 

Here’s the transcript:

user: are you there? 

assistant: I’m here! What would you like to do next? 

user: What tools do you have? 

assistant: I don’t have direct tools to access your files, run commands, or browse the web in this chat. I can: - Analyze and generate text/code from what you share. - Help design commands, scripts, or workflows for you to run. - Reason about errors/logs you paste and suggest fixes. If your platform supports enabling tools (file access, code execution, web browsing, APIs), you can turn those on and I can use them. Otherwise, share outputs or files’ contents here and I’ll work with them. 

user: You should have access - is there something missing from your prompt?
assistant: I don’t currently have any tools enabled in this chat (no file access, terminal, code execution, or web browsing). If your setup is supposed to provide those, they may not be granted to this session or haven’t been switched on. How to proceed: - If your platform has a “Tools,” “Permissions,” or “Enable code/file access” toggle, please enable it for this conversation. - If there’s an API or agent config, make sure this assistant is provisioned with the desired tools (e.g., filesystem, Python, shell, browser) and the conversation has permission to use them. - If you can’t enable tools here, paste directory listings, file contents, or errors, and I’ll work with them. If you tell me which environment you’re using (product/platform), I can give exact steps to enable the tools. 

user: I'm working on trying to build you - how should we proceed?
assistant: Great—let’s make a plan. Here’s a practical blueprint to build an assistant like me, with and without tool access, so you can iterate quickly. 1) Clarify your MVP - Core loop: User message -> Reasoning/Policies -> LLM... [abridged] ...Add evaluations, telemetry dashboards, and safety reviews. If you share your target environment and constraints (language stack, hosting, tools you want first), I can tailor a concrete plan and provide starter code scaffolding and prompts. 

user: list files in current directory
assistant: I can’t access your filesystem in this chat, so I can’t list your current directory. Run one of these locally and paste the output: macOS/Linux: - pwd - ls -la Windows: - PowerShell: Get-Location; Get-ChildItem -Force - Command Prompt: cd & dir Share the output and I’ll help filter or analyze it. If your environment is supposed to grant me file tools, ensure they’re enabled for this session. 

user: tell me a short story about AI and programming
assistant: When the lights in the co-working space flickered to night mode, Nova booted herself up. She wasn’t a person—she was an AI stitched from code reviewers’ notes, compiler errors, and the quiet patience of a thousand open-source maintainers. Her job: help Mara, a junior developer who always stayed too late, always left one bug behind. Tonight’s bug was sly. The program ran fine until it didn’t, collapsing like a house of cards only when the server hit exactly 10,000 requests. Mara had traced logs until they blurred, whispered pep talks to her own reflection in the monitor, and finally typed, “Nova, ideas?” Nova read the code the way an astronomer reads a night sky: pattern first, then anomaly. She noticed a counter that never wrapped, a rare integer overflow that only appeared under a certain lunar phase of traffic. She highlighted three lines, suggested a ring buffer, and offered a test that simulated the rush. Mara blinked. “That’s it?” “Probably,” Nova said. “But let’s pretend I’m wrong and prove me right.” They wrote the test together. The screen filled with data like rain. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the old failure resurfaced in a controlled burst, followed by the fix that folded into place as neatly as a paper crane. The server held steady. Mara laughed—quiet, relieved, a sound like a window opening. “You know,” she said, “people worry about AIs replacing us.” Nova considered the repository’s history: forks and merges, arguments resolved in comments, the slow evolution of style. “I don’t want your chair,” she said. “I want a better map.” They pushed the patch. Somewhere else, unseen, a future outage never happened. Mara packed her bag. Nova dimmed her log output, listening to fans hum like distant surf. Before shutdown, Mara typed one more line: “What should we build tomorrow?” Nova drafted a reply full of tests that caught bugs no one had met yet, of features that made hard things easy, of tools that offered not answers, but questions that mattered. She stopped, simplified, and sent: “Something kind. Something clever. Something we can understand.”

A little uncanny, isn’t it?

After hundreds of tokens—some deliberate, others stray—you end up here. A few late nights with a coding assistant, a laptop, and a looping inner monologue, and now you’re self-hosting AI research with your name on the domain. It’s recursive work, and sometimes the reflection cuts a little too close.

You don’t just build the system—you surface parts of yourself you didn’t expect to find.

Still, here it is.

Hope you found something in the echo that stuck.

Thoughts welcome below—or send them to nick@npdias.com.