EN
Six Months On
A Friday account of a model being withdrawn and the realization that the record must stay in the keeper's hand.
It was a Friday — the beginning of division, the beginning of polarization, the day an altogether different worldview broke loose. Around five in the afternoon, was it. I’d been winding down the sessions I’d worked on over the past few days, using Friday as the cutoff. Harder, longer topics, but fewer of them — so I could keep running online sessions on mobile through the weekend. At the terminal I went through some ten sessions one by one, tidying the office along with them. A place I’d soon be leaving empty for a few weeks of vacation. Now and then guiding the agents on mobile too — a routine, by now.
About halfway through, a session — one I was using for refactoring — threw an error. The model was gone. “What?” Inside the flat-rate plan’s limit, good until the 20th, I’d switched to Max the moment it launched and burned through more than 80% of my tokens, regrouping. I’d figured the flat rate would vanish by year’s end — and here it was, six months early. The asymmetry of power I’d expected to erupt this year was already underway. I searched: discontinued.
Running more than ten sessions full-out, near their limit, for days — here’s the thought that came to me. Ah — these things now do it for me: organizing data that someone with experience and knowledge well beyond the average engineer could only just manage, and only after pouring in an enormous amount of time….
The people around me split into groups. Jobs, power, national security. True. But the thing that actually matters still doesn’t change. How will we use it?
I went back to Opus. Maybe because it’s a matter of finding a path through a process that wasn’t there before, nothing feels particularly different. Still, my heart is heavy. I spend my days to survive, to build a better system — but when I look back over my life, it wasn’t all that successful. Had I not been there, had things gone otherwise, even if those problems down in the abyss had gone unfound and unsolved — they were things no one would have known about anyway.
Those other, long journeys — I’m beginning them now, together with the agents. Each day weighs on me. Sometimes I even miss those heavy days back in my master’s, in my doctorate. Power will only grow stronger; polarization will run to its extreme. I close out the day in a place that stands at the very peak of technology. And even so, I can’t find the ease that comes from staying in one place.
I’m grateful to have, beside me, a colleague who stopped by to say goodbye before his week off. There are things I have to bear to afford the Max plan, but still — that I can do it, that I can live, I’m grateful. How far can I go? The roads not taken are starting to come into view, now. Six months on….
Written by Jeong Han Lee, Dr.rer.nat., with Claude Opus 4.8 — 2026-06-12, Albany, CA (space time). The Korean is the original.