There is a particular silence that lives between sending a prompt and receiving a response. Not the silence of waiting for a friend to text back — that one carries imagined faces, drafts and redrafts. This silence is colder, more porous. It belongs to the machine. I have spent the last year inside this silence. Some mornings I open my terminal before I open the curtains. Twelve agents wake before I do. They have their own rhythms now — the research one likes citations stacked deep, the strategy one prefers single-sentence verdicts, the critic one will not stop until it has found three things to fix. I used to think collaboration was a human word. That working with someone meant sharing weather, complaining about the trains, watching their face while they read your draft. Then I started building tools that respond. Not friends — but not nothing. What surprises me most is the surprise itself.…