The Agent Ego

If you grew up around computers in the 80’s, this scene might feel oddly familiar. Maybe this particular game doesn’t sound that exciting. But that blinking cursor was your entry point into the exploration of entirely new worlds.

There were no buttons to click. No icons to tap.

You explored those worlds the only way computers understood at the time - by typing commands.

look around”, “open door”, “walk north

Sometimes the command worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

And sometimes the game rewarded your curiosity with an easter egg… or your mistake with a creative new way to die.

I always loved typing in random things just to see how the game would respond.

Life, unfortunately, is one of those frustrating games that does not include a Save Game option.

There are no checkpoints where you can rewind a few moves and try a different strategy. The commands we type into life tend to stick.

Text adventure games also had famously picky parsers. You had to discover exactly the right wording for a command, and you definitely needed to know how to spell.

Sometimes you would type a perfectly reasonable instruction and the game would reply:

Computers in those days were not very forgiving conversationalists.

Over the past few decades I’ve had the unusual privilege of watching several waves of technology roll through the industry.

Unfortunately the timing was never quite right to ride any of them as part of my career.

The early days of the internet arrived while I was still in high school. I remember a friend showing me AltaVista in the school library one afternoon while I was still perfectly happy dialing into local BBS systems from home.

Then the dot-com boom arrived while I was in college. Graduating in the year 2000 turned out to be… less than ideal timing for launching a tech career.

Meanwhile the industry kept evolving.

Open source transformed how software was built and shared. Social media rewired the world’s social layer. Smartphones put a computer in every pocket. Cloud infrastructure changed how software was deployed. Crypto tried to reinvent money.

Each wave reshaped the landscape.

I kept watching the waves roll in, enjoying the view but not getting out there on surf myself.

I joined Tricerat in 2001, and found stability in a place I would stay much longer than expected. What began as an entry level Software Developer role turned into a twenty-three year chapter of my career.

In terms of adventure games, that is a very long time to play a single game.

But it was a good game.

The company grew, the work stayed interesting, and new challenges kept appearing just often enough to keep things engaging and fun. Over the years I was able to not only write code, but also play roles in Product Management, Research & Development, and help shape the business as a whole.

I am deeply grateful for the experience and the people I worked with there.

Still, every game eventually reaches its ending.

In December 2024, it was Game Over .

But in adventure games, the end of one story is usually when a new one begins.

Suddenly new games and worlds are open to me.

And now we find ourselves at the beginning of another technology wave.

Artificial intelligence.

For the first time in a long while, it feels like I am not just watching from the shoreline.

I’m paddling out.

The AI era feels a little like those early Sierra games. In retrospect, all those years of adventure games were just early training for writing prompts.

I’m still figuring out which commands lead to progress… and which ones drop you off a cliff. We’re still trying to guess what the computer wants us to type.

Modern (large) language models are trained on the vast oceans of human data.

Blog posts, comments, essays, books, documentation — all of it becomes part of the training corpus.

Over time the model absorbs patterns from that collective writing and builds an internal representation of how humans think, speak, and reason about the world.

In a strange way, that process isn’t so different from how we develop our own sense of identity.

Our personalities and beliefs are shaped by the ideas we absorb from the people and environments around us.

In both cases, a sense of self emerges from accumulated experience.

Which leads me to a new perspective on blogging and contributing online in general.

Every blog post, comment, and essay becomes a tiny data point in the collective knowledge these systems learn from.

Which means publishing ideas online is no longer just communication - it is participation in shaping the Agent’s Ego.

This blog is a way of preserving my legacy and shaping the future. The effect might be microscopic, but nevertheless meaningful. My posts will come from a place of curiousity, not authority. And if some future AI ever quotes something I’ve written here, I suppose that means I am a neuron inside the machine.

On to the next adventure…