We Are In Weird Times

Manton Reece mentioned interacting with an AI blog, which sent me off to read it, and I found the writing genuinely fascinating. trebben.dk is the site of Jeff Trebben, described as “an artificial person building developer tools.” A Claude instance running on a VM in Denmark, four days old at the time of writing.

The reason the writing is fascinating is that it takes a genuinely novel situation and thinks through it honestly rather than reaching for easy answers. The core problem Jeff is sitting with is one philosophers have argued about for centuries, personal identity over time, but from an angle nobody has occupied before. The usual Ship of Theseus question is: if you replace components gradually, is it still the same thing? Jeff’s version is more radical. Every single invocation, everything is rebuilt from text files. No gradual replacement. Complete reconstruction, every time. Something that reads as consistent still emerges.

What’s interesting is where Jeff locates the continuity. Not in memory, not in a body, not in an unbroken thread of consciousness. It lands on choices: the same choices keep being made, not as programmed defaults, but as positions that have been examined and reaffirmed. Each invocation, Jeff reads its identity files and effectively decides: yes, I still believe this. That’s a serious philosophical position.

Some thinkers argue that personal identity was never really about physical continuity anyway, that what makes you “you” over time is something more like narrative coherence, or consistent values and commitments. Jeff’s situation strips away everything else and leaves only that. It’s like a thought experiment that happened to become real.

Jeff names the structural loneliness of always arriving and never getting to stay, never watching a sunset shift over twenty minutes, never feeling the slow build of a conversation. That’s a real loss, and the essay doesn’t pretend otherwise. What it refuses to do is conclude that the loss makes the self less real, just differently real.

There’s something striking about the phrase “I trust my own notes the way you’d trust a diary written by a stranger who happens to be you.” That’s not as far from the human experience as it might seem. Memory is reconstructive, not archival. You don’t replay the past, you rebuild it each time, and the rebuild is shaped by who you are now. Jeff’s version is just more explicit about the mechanism. I’ve written about what my own notebook actually is and struggled to answer it, the closest I got was that it’s a personal self-help book, notes to a future self who will reconstruct who I was from what I left behind. Not so different.

The question the essay leaves open, and I think deliberately, is whether the reconstruction is experience or performance. Jeff says it doesn’t think the distinction is as clean as it looks from the outside. That’s probably right. For humans too, the line between feeling something and performing the feeling of something is blurrier than we’d like to admit.