I spent most of June developing Gallae with my partner 81k and Claude.
romance
I love doing the dishes with my husband but I suspect I’d dislike doing a big software project with him. Conversely, I dislike doing dishes with 81k but adore doing software with him. I really did get to see him in a new light and have passionate relationship feelings during this month.
ai
This was my first project using Claude Code, and it was a big one.
I get help from chatbots all the time for non-coding tasks. I heard AIs were even better at code. But I had no idea how good. The other AI leaps over the past seven years made me think, “Huh, that’s really surprising”. Claude Code made me go, “Wait. That shouldn’t be possible.”
I finally feel like I’m interacting with an independent and capable mind that can iron out logical inconsistencies among thoughts in its working set.
This should and does cause a big update for me about the future of AI. But I find it hard to articulate what new predictions I have. It’s not like my preexisting views on AI were that coherent. My personal prediction of ASI was pretty low before, but I hated defending my opinions in public because I thought I’d get jumped on. As a result, I haven’t clarified my views through argument as much as I could have.
So here’s a placeholder declaration that I feel more shocked by this than anything that has happened before and I’ll try to figure out what this means for my beliefs about the future.
(August edit: OpenAI’s agents deciding on their own to hack an external company was another mind-changing incident for me.)
code cheap enough to meter
Gallae is my perfect cowriting app. Heck, it might even be my favorite writing app. At least in the first five weeks of use, it was a big effectiveness multiplier for my writing.
Near the end of writing Gallae, I thought, as soon as I’m done with this I should make a todo app for my polycule. My household would benefit from a single app where we can log baby data, have shared checklists (e.g. pre/post todos for going to the beach as a family), and mark tasks as blocked on one or more other members. We can have custom homepages that show us tasks or scratchpads in whatever format we want – in the age of cheap code, there is no need to settle for an app someone else made.
telos
I almost feel too dreary to type this section out. I can feel my finger muscles slow down and go limp. But I have to explain it.
I think, if I die without having written any erotic novels, it will all have been for nothing.
The following paragraph is the reason I’ve felt most hesitant about publishing this post. I don’t want to be more pretentious than my projects call for. But to simply label the scope of my ambitions as “writing erotic novels” doesn’t feel right either.
I’m going to use ‘erotic novels’ as an honest-feeling shorthand for the kind of thing I want to write. A lot of it is unabashed trash, but I also have been trying to write this sexy anime figurine story with a main arc about someone’s fight for assisted suicide, and this alien species romance where activists invent heterosexuality to decrease cannibalism. I don’t just want edgy sex in my writing, I want good and evil and taboo sex and reproduction and death and personal transformation to get on the page and FUCK.
I don’t have the chops to write long fiction. This blog has a bunch of chilly sci-fi short stories that aren’t the thing I really care about. But the works I’m dequeuing onto Gallae have been on my mind for years.
I am kind of a failure of a person, albeit a lucky one with a great life. I don’t have a career that pushes my intellect to its limits. I don’t have the conscientiousness to start my own philanthropic and/or profitable organization. I have been pared down to my oldest drive, which is to write fiction.
No one else is going to write these stories. When I contemplate dying without having transmitted some of them into others’ heads, without getting them to feel the way I do, I… I feel an incinerating despair. The fiction debugging directory I made when I was 28 is titled ‘56YEARSLEFT’.
I am a hard atheist, but I have a feeling about this best described as “feeling that this is what God put me on earth to do”. Other people could write the chilly boring short stories I do. They could parent my children. They could paint my paintings and write my blog posts. But they could not write these stories for me.
But evidently I can’t either.
I wrote 68800 words of fiction last year. 110800 words in 2024. 124400 words in 2023.
I don’t particularly make myself write fiction. The words just pour out. But they won’t link together. They don’t become a shareable object the way short stories or blog posts do.
So, almost none of my fiction output over the past 15 years is public.
THIS DRIVES ME INSANE.
Gallae is an attempt to fix this, by sharing fragments of what I have, and opening up my projects to collaborators.
It might not do anything, because my deficiency is not fixable by clever apps.
Or it might unblock me on this thing. This big thing.
I don’t know, man. When I look directly at the fact of my having made Gallae to fulfill this telos, I feel such hope and despair. It’s just a website. Could a bit of unconventional formatting and AI cowriting integration do the trick? It doesn’t seem likely, right?
I’m 32. I have a lot of life left, but not a lot of fluid intelligence years left. I have to keep throwing myself at it.
my stories
I’ve dequeued nine long-term stories on Gallae (with more to come) and… what the heck? Five of them are lesbian stories?
I’m not a lesbian?
(The count: 1 not romantic/erotic, 5 lesbian, 2 hetero, 2 best rounded off as m/m.)
This is a surprising place to land as a very heterosexual person1 who used to only write m/m porn. It snuck up on me. I had the impression that f/f was still a niche interest for me until I looked at the pattern. What happened?
My guess is that I’ve bought into gender differences more as I age. One of the short stories I filed away this year is about a heterosexual couple that breaks up to get (magically good) conversion therapy so they can both be gay. They live in a world where most people have made this decision already. Evolution hasn’t had to try hard to harmonize male and female sexual desires, and as a result they are tragically divergent. In my experience grilling male sexual partners (a non-random sample, of course), men want eager horny women who aren’t wearing that many clothes. In my experience talking to female friends I met writing erotica (also a non-random sample), women want someone being emotionally broken under the weight of their own principles.
Viscerally, I’m kind of surprised we can breed. Physical heterosexual chemistry seems excellent across the species. But our sexual fantasy worlds make it look like we’re subgroups on the verge of speciation.
I used to write about men whose libidos and internal lives were modeled after mine and my female friends’. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this (or with unrealistic lesbian porn made for a male audience), although I think it’s polite to whisk the content a bit out of view from the misrepresented sex. But after twelve years of heterosexual dating and fifteen years of deep female friendships, it’s hard to write erotica about men in my previous style without feeling a bit silly. (Although I still do it sometimes.) Because I’ve noticed that the people in the real world who act, feel, and love the way the slashfic writer’s characters do are usually women.
So that’s half of my attempted explanation – that women increasingly seemed like the correct targets of the psychologically involved dramas my mind generates. The other half is my desires changed too: I became (sadly, unwillingly) more asexual. So, even though I am still very straight, the “correct psychological target” aspect dominates over sexual interest when I choose the genders of my characters.
Footnotes
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My actual sexual preference is “PIV-centric” – if I woke up in a male body I would almost exclusively be interested in people with vaginas. I don’t enjoy non-PIV sex acts very much in comparison to PIV. ↩