---
title: "I keep opening the tab"
date: "2022-12-08"
summary: "A week in, a founder who waited two decades for this can't stop opening the tab — every night he brings it something harder, and every night it goes further than he expects"
tags: ["chatgpt","ai","founder","early-days"]
---

It is two in the morning in Santa Monica and I am still talking to a website.

We moved here in the autumn — my wife, the three kids, the whole life packed into a rented house a few blocks from the ocean — because Los Angeles is where the crypto world has decided the future is being minted, and I had a Web3 project that needed to sit inside that gravity. So here I am, an ocean from home, chasing one future. And a different one keeps quietly opening in a browser tab while the house sleeps.

A week now. I open the tab the way other people check whether they locked the door — reflexively, needing to confirm it is still real, still there, still answering. Each time it does, something in me settles for a second and then immediately wants to push harder.

So I push. I give it a contract clause in dense legalese and ask it to find the trap. I make it write a regex, then explain the regex to a child, then rewrite the whole thing as a sea shanty. I feed it the kind of half-formed product question I would normally chew on for a weekend, and it hands me back five angles — three of them wrong, two I had not seen. The wrongness does not bother me. I have spent twenty years with tools that were confidently useless. This one is usefully unsure, and that is a different animal entirely.

I keep trying to find its edge. Every night I bring something harder — a worse problem, a stranger request, a corner I am sure it cannot reach. Every night it gets further than I expect, and I go to bed planning tomorrow's test instead of sleeping.

This is what I have been waiting for. Not the party trick, not the clean answers. The fact that I cannot exhaust it. In 2018 and 2019 I built things that needed exactly this and did not have it, and I learned to live with the gap. The gap is closing now, in real time, on my own screen, and I am the only one awake to watch it.

Tomorrow I will open the tab again. I already know I will.