SOUL.md

October 7, 2026

Dear,

Like all of us, life doesn't take it easy on me sometimes.

Work is hard and unforgiving. Even while living under the same roof, I barely see my parents. I long to be surrounded by my friends, my lovely aunts and uncles, and my cousins. Instead, I struggle to answer texts and feel abysmal for it.

So I romanticize the sacrifice: work is important. Software must write itself. If we can build superintelligence, we will cure disease, explore the stars, and make human suffering obsolete.

Surely, when laying the foundations of the internet, people told themselves the same thing. And they had every right to: that very internet gave birth to AI! But it wasn't just Woz, Eich, Ritchie, or Thompson. It was the kids who slept under desks to crimp Cat5 cables through the floorboards at Netscape, and the maintainers who kept the obscure open-source libraries of dead infrastructure startups alive.

If I saw myself in a documentary years from now, after it all came true, I wouldn't care about the late nights or legendary PRs. It's the collective will of tens of thousands of people across the world making it happen in their own way. The CEO doesn't build the product. The engineer doesn't steer the ship.

I'm perplexed by myself. I thought believing in the destination would make the means hurt less, but it hasn't. In a codified world, remorse is binary: either you alone change the universe or you wasted your time. Ten more hours a week feels idealist.

I don't need an artificial mind to understand that; I think I just wrote this to hear my own voice. I need someone outside this machine to remind me what we used to talk about before the world changed.

SEE YOU SOON, SPACE COWBOY...