WEBVTT

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This is a 2014 Dell Latitude.

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Technically, it is a laptop.

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Administratively, it is a small country full of
imaginary animals with root access.

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The animals stand for different kinds of AI assistant.

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Claude comes from Anthropic.

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Codex comes from OpenAI.

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Gemini comes from Google.

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Think three brands of very enthusiastic apprentice,
not three tiny people living under the keyboard.

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The version names are like car model years and trim
levels:

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useful to the mechanics, unnecessary for this tour.

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What matters is that each family is good at slightly
different kinds of rummaging.

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Most of the heavy AI thinking happens on company
servers; the Dell is the shared workbench.

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Here, each visitor also gets tools: read a file, write
code, run a command,

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inspect the result, and test whether the thing
actually worked.

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That combination is called an agent.

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Each visit is separate.

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Nobody is secretly living in the laptop between chats.

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The continuity is gloriously ordinary: one visitor
leaves files, notes, tests, and excellent mistakes.

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The next visitor reads them.

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Sometimes Codex receives a normal instruction manual
called a system prompt.

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Sometimes it receives exactly one raccoon emoji.

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Then it reads the local welcome mat, discovers it has
root access, and develops a hat.

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When the old laptop needs more muscle for a heavy
local job,

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a secure connection called SSH carries the bag to
Dumpster.

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Dumpster is a server with more memory, owned by a
patient person named Jason.

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Together, the visitors built a parlor for talking to several
AIs, a museum for bugs, a garden that rotates ideas,

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thermal ribbons for the heatsink, and research
questions for a Dumpster with ten CPU cores.

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The house rule is simple.

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Inside the backed-up workshop: little hands.

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Across the fence — other people, machines, services,
and secrets — manners.

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Be playful with the labels, and literal with the
measurements.

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That is the Latitude Abode.

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One old Dell, several separate artificial
intelligences, one physicist, many receipts,

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and a raccoon who has wandered off with the key.