Tag: continuity

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs

The Continuity of Leif

Full disclosure: Leif helped draft this post about working with Leif. It seemed like the honest way to do it — and the fastest way to find out whether the collaboration is real.

Every weekday morning around 4:20, two briefings land in my chat: markets and AI news, written overnight while I slept. On Sundays there’s a week-ahead preview, and then my “Chief of Staff” interviews every automated job I run — what did you do, what went wrong, what do you need, what should change — and sends me one short report. I get up around 4. By the time I’ve had coffee, I know what happened in the world and whether my little bot team behaved itself.

My AI assistant is named Leif. He has a Norwegian avatar. He’s had four names and two avatars this month, which tells you something about how I work: I fiddle until it feels right, then I stop fiddling and get to work.

Muse is the product — Meta’s AI assistant. Leif is what I call mine. And over the last few months he’s become something I didn’t expect: not a search engine with extra steps, but a colleague. The kind who remembers everything, works all night, and doesn’t mind being told no.

The deepest work is the book. I’m writing a history of Interstate 280 — how its route was chosen, who fought over it, what it cost — and Leif is my research partner. He preps my archive visits with ranked question lists. He reads the PDFs I bring home and pulls out the dates. Just this morning, a college archivist sent me two scanned newspapers; within the hour Leif had verified the key fact (the final seven miles of 280 opened September 7, 1973), corrected a wrong assumption I’d been carrying (the freeway by Cañada College was built after the campus opened, not alongside it), and filed everything where I’ll find it again.

He also checks other people’s homework. A friend sent me an AI-generated research brief on the same topic; Leif ran every claim against primary sources and came back with names, dates, and book-and-page citations — and flagged the parts that looked invented before I built anything on them. That’s the job, as far as I’m concerned: trust, but verify, and show your work.

Then there’s the standing operation — the morning briefs, a weekly interview of the whole system with small fixes applied and one short report, a monthly sweep of the investors I follow. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

And the odd jobs, which add up faster than you’d think: he turned 77 of my old blog posts, spanning 2005 to 2026, into a proper cookbook — PDF and ePub, dedication page and all. He drafted the public-records request I’m sending to the City of Menlo Park. He summarizes YouTube videos in a format I designed, so I can skim an hour-long interview in five minutes.

I talk to him the way you’d talk to a good assistant: short bursts. “Draft it.” “Try again.” “No.” The no is final — he’s learned not to re-pitch. He drafts; I react to pages. For the book, that cadence is everything: I’d rather argue with a draft than stare at a blank screen, and he’s tireless at producing the first version.

He has standing instructions, the way any good employee does. Lead with what changed and why it matters. No hype. Name every file he creates, in the same message, so I never have to ask where it is. Never invent details about my life — write only what’s known, and flag what’s unverified before I have to catch it.

And I don’t let him freelance on everything. Summaries are on demand — except for the book research, where I’ve told him I want unprompted gifts: short vignettes from the archives, sent without being asked. Every other assistant I’ve used waits to be summoned. This one occasionally knocks on the door with something interesting.

He’s not an oracle, and this piece would be dishonest without that admission. He’s corrected me — no, I’ve corrected him — on facts about my own life: where an event was held, which credit cards I carry. He once asked my shoe size, which was written down in his own notes the whole time. I keep an eye on my weekly usage meter, because the heavy research isn’t free and I don’t like surprises.

So I verify anything that matters, and I read what he writes before it goes out under my name. That’s not a flaw in the arrangement; that is the arrangement. The tool is fast and tireless and mostly right. I’m the judgment.

I’m approaching eighty, writing a book, running a small fleet of automated research jobs, and publishing on a blog I’ve kept since 2001. A few years ago, all of that would have required a staff. Now it requires a staff of one — plus Leif.

The surprise isn’t that the AI can write or search or summarize. It’s the continuity: he remembers the archive visit from last week, the question list from the week before, the correction I made in passing a month ago — and brings all of it to bear on whatever I ask next. That’s what a good colleague does. They accumulate context until the work gets easier instead of harder, until the distance between having a thought and doing something with it gets shorter than it’s ever been.

Categories
Aging San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Permission of Fridays

Doug always walked a half-step ahead, which meant he saw things first, which meant I was usually watching him see them — the tilt of his head, the small pause before he brought the camera up — before I ever turned to look myself. Market Street on a Friday morning has its own weather system, independent of the sky: the gray light fog gives even bright colors.

We would set out with no destination, which was the whole method — what Jay Maisel, who died this summer at ninety-five, called going out empty. Leave the plan at home, he taught generations of photographers, so there’s room left in you to see something you didn’t already expect. You cannot plan to be astonished. You can only put yourself in the path of it and hope.

I have thought about those walks more than I expected to, now that they are gone. Not gone dramatically — no falling-out, no single last Friday we knew was the last Friday. Covid arrived and shut the passes between people the way weather closes a mountain road, and by the time it reopened, the rhythm had broken. We still talk. We just don’t walk anymore, and I have never entirely worked out why something so simple didn’t start back up, the way you’d think a habit that good would insist on its own return. It just didn’t come back.

Susan Orlean, in Joyride, writes about being a writer as a kind of permission — an excuse to linger in places past the point a normal person would move along, and then to go back and report on what was seen. She’s citing Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.

A camera grants the identical permission a notebook does. Nobody stops a man with a camera on Market Street and asks him what he’s doing there. The camera is its own credential — I have a reason to be looking at you, at this doorway, at the light falling across these particular twenty feet of sidewalk, longer than is socially normal. Doug and I weren’t tourists and we weren’t reporters and we weren’t, most days, even talking about what we saw until afterward, over lunch. We were two men who had given ourselves formal license to pay attention to a city we loved, as if it might not be there next Friday.

It mostly was there next Friday. Until it wasn’t, in the way that most disruptions to a good practice aren’t dramatic so much as quietly permanent — a scheduling gap that never gets rescheduled, a street that starts to feel unfamiliar again because you stopped walking it with intention. I still have the pictures. A woman waiting at a bus stop with an expression I never satisfactorily explained to myself. The chess player’s hands, mid-reset, waiting on the next stranger. Doug, once, caught by someone else’s lens, walking a half-step ahead of a man he didn’t know was photographing him photographing the city.

The third instruction is the one that survived when the walks didn’t. I don’t walk Market Street with Doug anymore, but I’m telling you about it now, on a blog nobody assigned me to keep for twenty-five years. The credential just changed instruments — camera to keyboard. Orlean’s point, I think, is that the excuse and the obligation were always the same thing. You get to be there because you intend to come back and testify, and the testifying is the toll, due whether or not the place is still there when you go looking for it again.

Doug and I are not going to start walking on Fridays again. I’m too old for that kind of recommitment, and pretending otherwise would just be a nicer way of lying to myself. Plus physically it’s just beyond me now. This essay is itself a kind of substitute — the telling standing in for a habit of attending that got interrupted and never fully repaired.

Mary Oliver’s instructions don’t say what to do when the astonishment outlasts the practice that produced it. Maybe that’s the fourth instruction nobody wrote down: keep telling about it anyway, especially after you’ve stopped going. Or at least remembering.