Six in the morning. The study. The Instant Pot was set for rice. Saathi was at tennis. The girls were somewhere in the house with their coffees and their phones, each of them in a different room. The coffee giving out wisps of steam.
On Threads, for about a week, people had been talking about Andrej Karpathy’s Obsidian setup. A second brain. A personal Wikipedia. I did not know who Karpathy was when the first post crossed my feed. By the third or fourth, I had gathered enough to be curious. I downloaded Obsidian. I had no idea what it was. I downloaded VS Code next. Then I opened Claude Code, took a breath, and typed:
Good morning. I am new to Claude Code. What do I need to do to get started?
I am fifty years old. I wrote software for seventeen years. I left that work in 2014 to raise my daughters and to write. I came back to technology in 2019 as a business analyst because the bills needed paying, and I dipped briefly back into development in 2022 long enough to confirm what I had already known in 2014, which was that the grunt work of coding bored me to tears. I was not the woman who still lived in a terminal. I had left that room twice, on purpose, and the second time I made sure.
And here I was at six in the morning, on a weekday, typing good morning to a machine.
Three months ago I would have told you I would never do this. I did not use AI. I did not trust AI. I did not want AI. For two years, I had repeated what my writing community repeated. The companies behind these tools had built them by stealing from us. OpenAI had trained on pirated books. The lawsuits had followed. Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, was in the same suit. My books were not in the data, as far as I know, but other people’s were, and those people were my community.
I held the position without ever having used Claude, or any AI tool. I had not read the filings. I had not opened an account. I was repeating what the writers I followed were saying, and I was saying it with the conviction of someone who had checked.
That was me. I was not handed a view I did not hold. I held it. I passed it on. I was part of how it spread.
Two things cracked it.
The first was a news cycle. The same company I had learned to hate pushed back publicly against a Pentagon demand to remove safeguards that would allow mass domestic surveillance. I am an activist in small ways. Civil liberties matter to me. The company doing this did not match the company I had been describing for two years. The harm was real. The pushback was also real. I had been talking about one of those and pretending the other did not exist.
The second was quieter. My Threads feed started showing me Claude. I saw writers I respected using it. I saw technologists I did not know making arguments I wanted to follow. The signal my writing community had filtered out was coming through a different channel, and what I saw there did not match what I had been telling myself.
I was curious. I made an account. That was early March.
What followed was a journey I am still inside. Six weeks of it, roughly, by the time I am writing this. It has changed enough of what I do and how I do it that I have been trying to find language for it for about a month, and I have not been able to. The language available in my writing community is the language of refusal. The language available in the technology community is the language of conversion. Neither of those is my language. I am not the convert and I am not the refuser. I am a writer who used to write software, who walked away from software twice, who found her way back to the terminal at six in the morning because of a post about a second brain.
I am writing it because the conversation we are having about this technology, in the writing world especially, is broken. I am writing it because the women in my community who are most exposed to what this tool is about to do to our labor are the least likely to have touched it. I am writing it because I spent two years repeating a view I had never tested. I owe the unwinding of it at least this much.
What this is, is a record.
The coffee was cold by the time I looked up. The Instant Pot had beeped. The girls had not emerged. Saathi was still at tennis. On the screen, Claude had answered. It had told me what to install, which commands to run, which file to open first. I had followed the instructions. Something was already running.
What I wanted, when I sat down that morning, was one tool. I had been trying for weeks to stop the detour I was making through Midjourney every time I needed a hero image for a blog post. I wanted the image to come from something that already understood what the piece was about. I wanted that same image to seed the social cards, the Pinterest pin, the Instagram square, without my having to carry it by hand across three platforms. I had tried to build the workflow. I had failed. The setup I had was not capable of what I was asking of it.
By the time the rice was done, the workflow I had been failing to build for weeks was running.
I did not know yet that the terminal I had walked away from in 2014 was about to become the delivery mechanism for the work I had walked toward. I did not know yet how much of what I thought I believed about this technology would survive the next six weeks, and how much would not.
I knew only that the coffee was cold, the rice was done, and the morning had started differently than I had expected.
The AI Journey
- The Morning I Downloaded VS Code — The morning I opened the terminal I had walked away from twice.
- Two Hours on a Monday Morning — A publishing pipeline, five weeks of failure, and the fifteen-minute replacement.
- Nine Point Six Percent — The SEO audit that asked me what twenty years of writing were for.
- The Librarian and the Historian — Reading across fifteen years of correspondence for a memoir.
- What the Dashboard Doesn’t Count — The cost of the migration that went wrong.
- Saturday Morning — The practice I have concluded for myself.
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