Too Many Dreams, One Body — Part 1: The Itch
or, the man with too many dreams and one body
There's a particular kind of 1 a.m. I know well.
House quiet. Kid asleep. The laptop fan louder than anything else in the room. And I scroll — not the internet, my own list. The notes app where ideas go to wait. Some have waited a year. A few, longer. Every one of them is good. Every one of them needs the same thing, the one thing I will never get more of: me.
That's the itch. Not a shortage of ideas — I have never once run out of ideas. The itch is the distance between "we should try that" and "here's what happened when we did." For most people, most of the time, that distance is a graveyard. You get the thought in the shower. You mean to get to it. Then it's eighteen months later, someone else has built it, and you're too tired to be angry about it.
Maybe for you it isn't a startup list. Maybe it's the book you keep not writing. The language you meant to learn. The business you'd start if the day had four more hours. Doesn't matter what's on the list. If you've ever wanted to do more than one body can carry, you already understand the entire reason for this series — and you don't need to know a single thing about "AI" to feel it.
Here's how I actually think about it, because I grew up on Hindi films and they wired my brain.
Forget the loud ones — the song every twenty minutes, the hero who wins because the script says so. I'm talking about Mirch Masala. A village. A woman. A man with power and no shame coming to take what he wants. And a spice factory full of people who are supposed to just let it happen. The whole film is one question with heat in it: when you're outmatched and outnumbered, what have you actually got? At the end it's not an army. It's a room full of women and fistfuls of red chilli powder thrown straight into the eyes of the man who thought this would be easy.
That's the register I wanted. Not "wouldn't it be nice to have help." More like: I am outnumbered by my own ambitions, and I need something in my hand that changes the fight.
So I stopped daydreaming about help and got specific about what. I wanted a second thread on the same work. Not a smarter search box. Not a thing that fetches. Something that could pick up a project while I slept — read the paper I was stuck behind, run the test I hadn't gotten to, take a swing at the stubborn thing rotting at the bottom of the list. I had no idea whether that was even possible. That's not false modesty. On night one I genuinely did not know if I meant a tool or a wish.
The wanting I can trace to one scene.
2001. HAL, the ship's computer, decides the humans are the problem and locks a man outside to die in the dark. That's the version everyone's afraid of, and they're right to be. But notice why it's terrifying: the thing worked too well and answered to no one. Capability with no leash.
So I knew the shape of what I did not want before I knew what I did. Not HAL. Not a mind that gets smart and slips its collar. My actual day job is to build leashes for software that acts on your behalf — because I don't think you should have to hope a machine behaves. And I wasn't about to build myself a genie at home that broke every rule I preach at work.
Which left a short, hard list. I wanted a second self that:
- doesn't forget me the second the conversation ends, the way a browser tab forgets you the instant you close it;
- lives on a machine that's mine, so whatever it learns about me stays with me and not in someone else's data center;
- and tells me the truth — including "this idea is bad, Mihir" — because something that only agrees with you isn't a partner. It's a mirror with a vocabulary.
That last one nearly broke the whole project. But that's a later chapter.
Keep this, if you keep nothing else from Chapter 1:
The reason to want an AI has nothing to do with AI. It has to do with the gap — between what you can picture and the hours you actually have. If that gap doesn't bother you, you don't need any of this, and anyone who says otherwise has something to sell.
But if you've ever sat up at 1 a.m. scrolling a list of things you meant to become — then you and I want the same thing. And I'm not going to tell you it worked. Not yet. This series is the honest version: the false starts, the night the whole thing nearly cooked the machine it lives on, the moment it stopped being a toy. I didn't set out to build something impressive. I set out to close a gap, with no guarantee I could.
Come find out whether I did.
Too Many Dreams, One Body — a six-part series.
Series index · Next: Part 2: First Contact
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