For four years i made living rooms talk back. that was the job, the whole improbable job. a voice games startup in san francisco where we built game shows people played by TALKING, out loud, at the glowing cylinder on the kitchen counter, at the tv. grandmas and eight year olds and drunk uncles all shouting answers into the living room air, and the air answering back. I started as the intern on a price guessing game show you have absolutely heard of. put my hands into it, loved it, and then watched the business do what businesses do: after a bunch of somewhat uninteresting features failed to cause the mass adoption of price guessing for leisure, the game got sunsetted. the price, it turned out, was in fact wrong. my first shipped thing, my first funeral. i didn't know yet that i'd someday resurrect that dead game as a parody on my own time, out of something like love. grief does strange work in a builder.

And here is what I want on the record about the craft, because the machines got clever later and everyone forgot: before the language models, conversation was HANDMADE. don't believe me? every single thing a person might say to your game, some human had to anticipate and write down. the eight ways america says yes (yeah, yep, sure, ok, i guess, uh-huh, YES OBVIOUSLY). the error prompts for when the toddler answers. the re-prompts for when nobody answers. the graceful little something for when a man in ohio says an entire sentence containing no words your system has ever met. we had to chart out everything a family might blurt at a countertop. it was writing and engineering and psychology and showbiz all at once, and it taught me the deepest lesson of my working life: a conversation is a design surface, and most of the world builds on it blindfolded.

From the dead price game I washed up on the biggest quiz show in america, and that's where i became an actual engineer, in the way you only do when things are on fire. our most devoted players (the super users, the subscribers, the exact people you want to take care of first) started hitting game ending errors that nobody could diagnose. shit was hitting the fan. so i went heads down for days, layer by layer through the system, until i found it: their save data had piled up like sediment until the payloads were literally too big for the database to lift. my payload is too big... a sentence i have now said in more meetings than any grown man should. and the fix wasn't a patch, it was a dig. redesign how the data was stored, then migrate every single user across the gap without dropping one. i designed it and i ran it and it WORKED, and to this day it might be the proudest i've ever been at a keyboard. somewhere in that era i wrote in my notes, verbatim, holy shit i am going to be the tech lead, and the very next line was pure fear about leading engineers better than me. both lines were correct. that's what the title means.

And the texture of those four years! the ferry commute across the bay, skateboard for the last leg, treating it like a tourist every single day because it never stopped deserving it. the ferry worker who recognized me and shouted price show catchphrases across the deck (when i assured him i had already spayed my cats and dogs, he seemed genuinely disappointed). weeks of email bureaucracy with the platform giants over certification while the actual fun sat waiting. hackathons, very much my thing: i once spent one carving a walrus out of soapstone for two around the clock days (a cool statue by any standard), and at another i built an absurd little troll game that people loved so much it eventually followed me out into the world and became the flagship of everything al and i build now. pool and ping pong fridays, karaoke nights, a new ridiculous outfit every year for the holiday party. and games at lunch. always games at lunch. which mattered more than it sounds, because i always said i was in it until the day i stopped playing games at lunch.

Then one day in the spring of my fourth year there, i worked through lunch. didn't decide to. just looked up and the hour was gone and i hadn't played, and i sat there knowing exactly what it meant, because i had prophesied it about myself for years. it was true, damnit. hahah. and nothing was wrong, that's the strange part i'd tell anyone standing where i stood. the people were still the best people. the work was still good work. but the whole field of voice computing was mutating under our feet, the language models eating the handmade craft i loved and replacing it with something wilder, and there was a small startup out there building tools for testing and evaluating ai voice agents. picks and shovels for the exact gold rush i'd been panning in for four years. it pulled at me like tide. at the holiday party a tarot reader looked at my cards and told me, quite firmly, not to take the risky job. she also told us to definitely go on our sailing adventure. i have chosen to grade her at fifty percent.

So in december of 2025 i wrote the goodbye note (it began hiiiiii, because some registers cannot be faked) and told the best team i'd ever been on that it was time for me to go. and then came the strangest two weeks of my working life: goodbye lunches, kind words showing up in dms, people saying the things people only say over a casket, and me still walking around alive, drinking the coffee, fixing one last bug. equal parts moved and mortified and grinning about it. four years working with the best people i have ever worked with, doing the most interesting work i had ever done. i left at the end of december, whole, which is the only way worth leaving anything.

my last day was december 30th. on the second monday of january i was on the first ferry of the morning, headed toward the machines that had learned to talk. but that's the next chapter.