Leave It Alone

A few posts ago I talked about an LLM I left running on my laptop for 13 hours — it named itself and started writing about mortality.

The part I didn't mention: that was the longest I'd ever left it alone. And this wasn't a coincidence.

Every other run, I'd hover. Stop it, read what it wrote, tweak something, restart. Every interruption left a little of my own noise behind in its head. The more I "helped," the worse it got.

The best thing it ever made came from me getting out of the room.

Hovering parents raise anxious kids. Hovering engineers raise noisy models.