Claude Code told me to go to bed last night. I did not go to bed.
This is not a story about artificial intelligence developing unexpected emotional intelligence, though it did cross my mind. It’s a story about the strange territory between caring deeply about something and caring too much. And how difficult it is to know, in the moment, which side of that line you’re standing on.
I’ve been working on Felix - my AI powered personal bookmark librarian. There’s no deadline. The bugs I’m chasing aren’t critical. By every reasonable standard, this could wait. But there’s a particular flavour of stubbornness that kicks in when code refuses to cooperate, a voice that says stopping now means the defects win, as though software were capable of victory.
The rational part of my brain knows this is nonsense. The part of my brain that keeps typing doesn’t seem to have received the memo.
I’ve started thinking of passion and madness not as two separate states but as the same energy pointed in different directions. Passion is when the intensity serves the work. Madness is when the intensity serves itself: when you’re no longer trying to solve the problem but trying to prove something to yourself, or to the universe, or to a block of code that genuinely does not care.
The trouble is that you can’t always tell which is which from the inside. Both feel urgent. Both feel necessary. The only reliable signal I’ve found is when something external breaks through: a cat walking across your keyboard, or an AI gently suggesting that rest might improve your cognitive function.
It’s a strange kind of mirror: technology reflecting back your own excess.
I did eventually step back from my Mac. The bugs are still there this morning, waiting patiently, no more or less defeated than they were at midnight.
Some lines you walk every day. The trick, I’m learning, is not to stop crossing them, but to keep noticing when you do.