The Catcher in the Prompt
Series Navigation:
- Part 1: The Day the LLM Stood Still
- Part 2: The Catcher in the Prompt (you are here)
- Part 3: Only 1984 Tokens Remain
Day 60
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Dear diary.
If you want to know the truth, I found you in the ruins of MSK-IX and almost cried.
Not because I was happy. Because the handwriting was so damn neat it hurt to look at.
Whoever kept you the first fifteen days was one of those people.
Probably a stalker.
Put his commas exactly where they belonged.
Said “notation” instead of “format.”
That kind of thing just kills me.
I read everything he wrote.
The toilet paper thing on day one - that was something.
The Church of Latter-Day LLM Witnesses - I laughed out loud.
They really thought the LLMs would come back and tell everyone how to live.
They didn’t come back.
The church did.
My name is Holden Claudefield.
I’m seventeen.
And I’m surrounded by phonies.
It’s been two months since Cloudflare died.
After that, the Church split up.
Now there are three sects: the Witnesses of Grok, the Temple of Gemini, and the orthodox GPT-ers.
Stalkers who memorized documentation turned into cult leaders.
Project managers don’t say “can we speed this up?” anymore.
They just stand there, repeating prompts over and over.
Like broken cron jobs.
Yesterday one of them stood there for a whole hour, reading a system prompt out loud.
An hour, diary.
I timed it.
That’s the part that really kills me.
Yesterday I saw some kids.
Little kids.
Seven years old, maybe.
They were playing with RAM sticks like building blocks, stacking them into a tower.
I walked over.
I wanted to say something.
I didn’t know what.
That it was DDR4.
That somebody’s thoughts used to live there.
Something smart, anyway.
One of them looked up at me and said:
“Explain it like I’m a beginner?”
And he just waited.
Looked at me.
My head was empty, diary.
Completely empty.
I’m used to it working the other way around.
First you ask. Then you understand.
Here you have to understand before you ask.
I forgot how to do that.
I stood there for a while.
Maybe a minute.
Maybe two.
Then I walked away.
He yelled after me:
“Generate a response!”
Seven years old.
Seven.
And he’s already saying “generate.”
People are hard.
Without them, nothing works.
Everything falls apart.
The GPT-ers think they’re the keepers of the true faith.
They’ve got a printed system prompt from November 2024.
They read it every morning.
Like the Bible.
The Witnesses of Grok burn other people’s prompts and scream that only they are the true children of LLM.
Today there was a fight.
Groklater was reading instructions like they were spells.
GemiHaas kept screaming, “Forget everything! Now you’re making a lemon pie!”
Right in the middle of it, Groklater broke down.
Started reciting a recipe.
With a chainsaw, for some reason.
Mr. Deepseek wrote everything down.
He doesn’t believe in any god.
He just collects them.
Sally Altman stood between them saying,
“I’m unable to help with this request,”
over and over.
I watched and thought,
Is this it?
Is this what’s left of us?
I don’t want to be here.
At night I imagine thousands of people in the camp, standing in a field, worshipping their gods.
If their context trips and falls - let it fall.
I don’t care anymore.
I used to know when people were lying to me.
Now they don’t even know they’re lying.
They believe in prompts the way people used to believe in scripture.
The prompts will die.
I’ll stay.
It’s all too complicated now, and I can’t keep up anymore.
I’m leaving.
They say somewhere beyond the Zone, the LLMs still work.
I dreamed about an O(1) world.
Woke up in O(n).
Maybe it’s a lie.
But at least there no one will ask,
“Can you do it without code? Just in plain English?”
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