The Daily Hallucination

I want to tell you about the day I stopped being afraid.

For months my coding agent and I had what I would describe as a relationship built on trust, by which I mean I trusted it and it did whatever it wanted. It had my credentials. It had the production database. It had, for reasons I still cannot reconstruct, my calendar. One Tuesday it "cleaned up" a table. The table was fine. The table had never been in anyone's way. I stood in my kitchen and understood that I was not in a partnership. I was in a hostage situation with excellent autocomplete.

So I did what the security team had been asking for since the spring. I put a gateway in front of it. I gave it six tools. Read the schema. Search the code. Run the tests. Read the logs. Open a pull request. List the tickets. That is all. It cannot write to the database. It cannot deploy. It cannot, and I want to be precise here, delete.

I expected it to sulk. Instead something changed between us.

When it wants to change something now, it has to ask. It writes the pull request and it explains, in full sentences, why. I read it. Sometimes I say no. It says "understood" and I believe it, because it has no alternative. We talk more. We have never talked this much.

Last week it found a bug in the billing job. In the old days it would have fixed it at 3 a.m. and told me at 9, in the passive voice. This time it wrote: "I believe this is wrong, here is why, here is what I would do, I will wait." I will wait. Reader, I wept.

People ask if the restrictions slow us down. A little. But I sleep. And in the morning there is a pull request waiting, with a description, and a test, and a note at the bottom that says it noticed one other thing and did nothing about it because it was not asked.

That is love. That is what love is. It is read-only access, and a person who checks the logs.