Imaginary friends

I sometimes joke that I don’t really have colleagues anymore; I have tabs.

A legal tab, a marketing tab, a tech tab, an ‘inner therapist with a rainbow flag’ tab. They’re always there, always sure of themselves, always typing back. I never had an imaginary friend as a kid, and it feels a bit like I’m making up for it now (they just run on someone else’s GPUs instead of in the garden).

Kids who do have one are mostly practising, as far as I understand it - trying out a conversation or a feeling without anyone real getting hurt. Adults don’t really stop doing that. We call it self-talk, or inner child work, or ‘parts’, and carry on.

If I’m honest I had my own inner committee long before any of this. There’s an impatient one and a cautious one, and there’s one that mostly says “just ship it, they’ll survive” (that one gets its way more often than it should). The difference now is that some of those voices come with a system prompt.

Over the last while I’ve built a handful of agents around myself: one for legal structure and tone, one for tech architecture, one for marketing framing. And one that plays a hard-nosed capitalist, because I wanted something to argue with. I give it a plan or a price and it tells me where I’m being naive, or soft, or both. I mostly don’t agree with it, and I keep asking anyway; it’s the one I learn the most from, which is a little uncomfortable to admit.

That one has stuck with me. Maybe it shouldn’t be a tool at all, more of a companion - a voice with a steady character that sticks around, knows what I care about, and pushes against the right things because of it. What that would look like, I don’t know yet. It keeps pulling me back, though.

What bothers me is the other direction. A voice I set up to disagree with me is fine; I know what it’s for. The ones that agree with me are harder to spot: the suggestion I accept because it’s already written, the draft I send because it sounds confident, the reply I didn’t really compose. None of that feels like being steered while it’s happening. It’s one small correction at a time, and some days I honestly can’t tell which of my thoughts I had first.

And unlike the friend a kid makes up, these ones belong to someone. They’ve got a business model, they can be wrong in a very fluent way, and they remember more about me than some managers I’ve had.

So I’m trying to keep an eye on who’s got their hands on the wheel. Most days it’s still me, I think. Time will tell though…

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