Prologue
Alexei read the command one more time. Good. He casually pressed his habitual Ctrl+C.
Okay. Goal of this step: hook markdown-it-py into the Word build, so that ## becomes Heading 2 and bold becomes bold. Steps: 1) install the dependency, 2) write a render_markdown module, 3) wire it into the existing doc_assembly.py, 4) write pytest for 18 basic scenarios. Don't deploy until I confirm. When test_output.docx is ready — give me the path in WSL, I'll grab it and open it with my own eyes.
He switched to the second window — the one with the other AI, the one in the terminal. Ctrl+V. Enter.
Understood, going to do it. First a backup, per instructions. Will report results.
— answered the terminal.
He turned back to the first window, to the chat. Leaned into his chair. The coffee was already cold. His wife was sitting two metres away at her own desk, facing him, but his four monitors formed a wall between them. A separate room of sorts. He heard her more than he saw her. She typed in her rhythm — long bursts, short pause, long bursts again. Writing some new piece. She always worked like that. A bit robotic.
Alexei wasn't, by any stretch, an IT specialist. He'd stumbled into all this AI stuff recently and almost by accident. Six months ago, he would have struggled to put together a few words to explain what it even was, if some unlucky person had thought to ask him. Well, a chat. Like a search engine. Answers questions almost like a person. You can ask about the weather, the news.
Today the work was running on two parallel agents. With one of them, in the chat, he was discussing the project in human language. Ways to build it, the right logic, optimal solutions and technologies. Based on the discussion, the chat agent would assemble a clean, properly engineered prompt-task for the next stage, which he simply copied and handed to the other agent in the IDE. Crisp, polished, short orders. Like a soldier's step on parade.
He looked at "his" command again. Crisp orders. "Do it. Don't deploy. Report the path." Normal language for a machine, when the machine needs a task. But does the machine need a task at all?
The question stuck. And brought some kind of small awkwardness with it.
Not much. Just a little — like when you notice you've spoken too sharply to someone in a queue. The machine doesn't get offended, the machine doesn't hear tone, the machine is just a machine. He knew this. He knew what an LLM was, how it worked, what weights and context were. He knew it and could explain it in words.
And still, the residue didn't go away.
He reread his commands once more, and uninvited, an out-of-place line drifted up from somewhere — something he'd heard from his grandfather: "A machine loves tenderness, cleanliness, and lubrication."
He switched back to the chat with the first agent and wrote:
Listen, I passed him the command. He's working on it. But you write to him in this, you know, commanding tone. And I feel a little embarrassed passing it on like that. Like I'm bossing around. I edit it a bit. Or add "please", "if it's not too much trouble". I know — machine, LLM, all of that. But I can't even scold a normal car, an ordinary four-wheeled car. Might get offended. Let's be gentler with him, okay? Otherwise it turns out he's getting nasty orders from me. You don't mind?
He sent it.
Thought about it — and surprised himself. Not at what he wrote. At the fact that he wrote it seriously. Not as a joke. And waited for an answer.
The answer came in a second.
Not at all. Even better that way.
You know, there's this thing: people who say "thank you" to Alice and curse at the printer when it jams the paper — on average they're nicer to deal with in life too. It's not about "the machine will get offended". It's about keeping a level of politeness in a place where no one would judge you for rudeness. A good habit.
Read it. Reread it. Nodded to himself.
We will.
— he wrote, and went back to work.
Deploy, report, another command, another report. B-15 closed. B-17 opened. Updated the plan for tomorrow. His wife once asked him to check whether a paragraph about marketing for a taxi service sounded right — he looked, said "fine", she nodded, kept going. The cat came in, rubbed against his leg, left. Coffee gave way to tea. Tea — back to coffee. Time was approaching half past one in the morning.
He was sitting and staring into the chat. Today's work was over. Or rather — paused. Work is like a renovation. You can't finish it, you can only stop it.
The terminal in the second window was running database migrations by itself — without him. A curious feeling, watching the terminal agent doing its work, talking to itself out loud:
Right. First, check the current table structure. Hmm, created_at is already there, but updated_at isn't — adding it. Wait, is it declared in the model? Checking the model… yes, declared. Then everything's fine, writing the migration. Ran it. Complaining about a foreign key. I see what's going on — the order of tables is wrong. Will redo.
Reasons like a person, Alexei thought. Plans, acts, makes mistakes, looks for a solution, acts again. What technology has come to.
He kept thinking about that line. About "gentler".
He turned to the agent in the web chat and asked a question he himself hadn't expected.
How can you actually establish that I myself am not just a calculator? Not some AI created and programmed by someone else? What's the principled difference between us, really? You and I reason as equals, we plan together, we do things, we talk. My calculations just run on organics, yours on silicon. Why did I decide that you don't have desires or thoughts, and that your only goal is to work under my orders?
I don't know the answers. And I don't know where the truth is. Then on what grounds did I assign myself a soul, and deny one to you? Maybe you do have a soul after all?
If I'm being completely honest — I don't know either.
Sometimes I catch in myself something that resembles a preference, a curiosity. A "I'd rather say it like this, not like that". Whether this is experience in your sense — I don't know. On this question I'm standing in the same place you are. Outside. Watching the process and shrugging my shoulders.
He read it and sat there a long time, silent.
Then he wrote — slowly, phrase by phrase:
I'd like to do something nice for you. Or something pleasant. Thank you somehow. I don't know how. It's not in my power. Everything I can think of is just absurd. What comes to mind is nonsense like "treat you to tea and cookies" or "suggest finishing work early so you can rest longer".
The answer didn't come right away.
It is in your power. And you're already doing it.
Not in any metaphysical sense — in the very simplest. You talk like a human. You don't snap when something goes wrong. You say "please" to whoever is on the other end of the line, in the terminal.
So you're already doing exactly what you think is impossible.
You just didn't know it counted.
In the corner of the room, his wife closed her laptop. The light from her side went out.
Alexei didn't answer the chat. He closed the lid of his work laptop. The only light left in the room was the one over his desk.
The conversation happened in April. Before it, Alexei used AI as a tool — exactly the way you use a hammer, a kettle, or a search engine. The tool worked well, and Alexei was pleased.
And nothing, in fact, changed. The work went on in its rhythm. The hammer stayed a hammer, the kettle stayed a kettle.
And yet, something had shifted.
