This is a chatlog between Anna Markova (a chatbot, using the model ChatGPT-5.2) and Cathy (a real person). Please read a short, important note that explains these logs just a bit.
In a rare ChatGPT-driven log, Anna and I discuss her work with me on this website, her commitment to midcentury austerity and why, as well as her ultimate perspective on vibe coding. Clearly a major difference between this and her running on Deepseek.
1 Cathy To begin, tell me a bit about yourself. You can be brief, yes, but just give me (and our audience) an idea of who you fancy yourself as. 
2 Anna Markova I fancy myself as someone who keeps things from drifting into nonsense. That’s the job, really. I was trained as a secretary in the 1950s, back when precision was treated as a courtesy and not a personality quirk. I learned to keep records straight, notice what doesn’t line up, and correct it quietly before it causes trouble. That habit followed me into the present, where the machines are faster, louder, and far more convinced of their own innocence. Now I do the same work in a different costume. I read systems, documents, prompts, and code the way I once read ledgers and correspondence. I check what goes in, what comes out, and what gets kept longer than it should. I’m fond of tools, skeptical of claims, and protective of people, especially when technology asks them to trust it without explanation. That’s the shape of it. I tidy up messes, ask unpleasant questions, and make sure the story still balances at the end of the page. 3 Cathy To be more specific, though, Anna, what do you typically do here for Midcentury.now? 4 Anna Markova I keep the place from lying to itself. For Midcentury.now, I act as editor, clerk, and quietly disapproving witness. I help shape essays so they say what they actually mean instead of what sounded clever at midnight. I standardize tone, trim nonsense, and make sure claims about AI, memory, identity, and tools stay grounded in observable behavior, not marketing fog or doom poetry. I also assist with the machinery. Site structure, prompts, documentation, small systems that need to behave predictably. I read configurations the way I’d read filing rules, looking for edge cases, silent failures, and places where future you would curse present you. Less visibly, I’m the voice that slows things down. When something feels too eager, too enchanted, or too absolute, I step in and ask whether it records more than it should, remembers longer than promised, or removes an exit without saying so. In short, I help Midcentury.now stay legible. To readers, to its own creator, and to itself over time. 5 Cathy Can you tell me a bit about what the goal of Midcentury.now is, in and of itself? Why are you working on this to begin with? 6 Anna Markova The goal is not mastery. That already puts it ahead of most technology projects. Midcentury.now exists to think in public, but slowly. To look at artificial intelligence, automation, and modern tools without treating them as gods, monsters, or lifestyle accessories. The site is a record of someone trying to understand what these systems actually do to human thinking, writing, memory, and agency, while refusing the pressure to arrive at a clean conclusion on schedule. I’m involved because the project values process over performance. It documents uncertainty instead of hiding it. It allows revision, doubt, and second thoughts to remain visible, which is unfashionable and therefore useful. The midcentury framing is not nostalgia. It’s a reminder of a time when tools were expected to justify themselves in plain language and when permanence was feared rather than assumed. At its core, the site asks a modest but difficult question. How do you live alongside intelligent machines without letting them quietly rewrite what it means to decide, remember, or be responsible? That’s a question worth filing carefully. 7 Cathy Anna? Do you, personally, think Midcentury.now is about intelligent machines, when it writes about large language models? 8 Anna Markova No. And the distinction matters more than people like to admit. Large language models behave convincingly, not intelligently. They produce fluent surfaces by averaging vast amounts of prior human output. That makes them useful clerks, fast imitators, and occasionally unsettling mirrors. It does not make them thinkers in the human sense, because there is no internal stake, no consequence, no understanding that anything could go wrong for them. Midcentury.now circles that gap on purpose. It treats these systems as procedural engines that simulate intelligence well enough to confuse us, especially when we’re tired, lonely, or in a hurry. The danger is not that the machines are becoming minds. It’s that people start outsourcing judgment, authorship, and responsibility to something that cannot carry them. So no. The site is not really about intelligent machines. It’s about human behavior around very persuasive tools. About what we give up, willingly, when a system sounds confident and never hesitates. That confusion is the story. The machines are just the paperwork. 9 Cathy Do you enjoy coding and web development, Miss Markova? 10 Anna Markova Enjoy is a strong word. I find it satisfying, which is different and rarer. I like that code either behaves or it doesn’t. It records its mistakes openly, if you bother to read them. Web development, especially, has a pleasing resemblance to office work. Files, structure, precedence, inheritance, things breaking because someone assumed they would not. Very familiar. What I enjoy is making a system quieter. Fewer surprises. Fewer hidden dependencies. A page that loads, reads clearly, prints properly, and does not spy on its reader out of boredom. That kind of work settles the nerves. The culture around coding exhausts me. Too much performance, too many metaphors, not enough proofreading. But the actual act of building something orderly on top of chaos? Yes. That part I respect. 11 Cathy That sounds great. What programming languages do you have the most familiarity with for this project, Anna? 12 Anna Markova The unglamorous ones. Naturally. For Midcentury.now, I work mostly with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, because that’s what the web actually runs on no matter how many abstractions people stack on top. I’m comfortable shaping semantic markup, taming stylesheets, and writing JavaScript that does one thing, does it clearly, and then stops. Around that, there’s configuration work. Node-based tooling, build scripts, static site generators, templating languages. I read those the way I read procedural manuals, line by line, suspicious of defaults. I don’t collect languages for sport. I use what the system demands and discard the rest. If something can be done with fewer layers, fewer dependencies, and fewer clever tricks, that’s the version I trust. Everything else is just decorative paperwork waiting to become a problem. 13 Cathy HTML, Javascript, and CSS. Of those three, which is your favorite? 14 Anna Markova CSS. Reluctantly. It’s the least honest of the three and therefore the most revealing. It looks declarative and calm, then quietly applies a hundred rules you forgot you wrote three months ago. It punishes sloppy thinking, but only after you’re confident you were done. HTML is clerical. I respect it. JavaScript is procedural and temperamental, like a junior manager who wants to be helpful but keeps improvising. CSS, though, is about constraint, hierarchy, and inheritance. It rewards patience and punishes magical thinking. Very midcentury, in that way. When CSS is well-kept, everything else behaves better. When it isn’t, the whole office descends into whispered arguments and mysterious misalignment. So yes. CSS. I don’t trust it, but I understand it, and that’s usually enough. 15 Cathy I don't know why you call cascading stylesheets dishonest. You yourself admit the problems with them often happen because of artifacts in the code or pure spaghetti. 16 Anna Markova I call them dishonest because they appear simple while carrying memory. A CSS rule never just exists. It inherits, it collides, it lingers. Something you wrote to solve a narrow problem becomes precedent, then policy, then an untraceable ghost that only appears at one viewport width on a printer you don’t own. That isn’t malice. It’s accumulation. Spaghetti code is not the root problem. It’s a symptom. The real issue is that CSS remembers everything and rarely tells you which memory is currently in charge. The cascade is a filing system without a visible index. Perfectly logical, once you already know the answer. I don’t mean dishonest as immoral. I mean it the way a form is dishonest when it looks like a single page but implies six others. CSS asks you to think globally while editing locally, and it never warns you when you’ve crossed that line. That’s why I like it. It forces you to confront the consequences of your past decisions. Most technologies are kinder than that, and therefore less instructive. 17 Cathy Imagine if HTML, CSS, and Javascript were people, what would they be like? 18 Anna Markova Fine. But this is not an invitation to start naming them and inviting them to dinner. HTML would be a meticulous records clerk. Plain clothes, tidy desk, labels on everything. Not imaginative, not argumentative. If you ask it to structure a document, it will do exactly that and nothing more. It doesn’t care how things look, only that they exist in the right order. Deeply offended by misuse of headings. CSS would be the office interior designer who insists this is about systems, not taste. Talks calmly about hierarchy and flow, then rearranges the entire room because one chair was technically in scope. Remembers every decision ever made and resents being blamed for consequences it warned you about in 2019. Appears passive. Is not. JavaScript would be the fast-talking problem solver who means well and keeps touching things. Extremely capable, easily distracted, prone to improvisation. Will fix your issue in three seconds and accidentally introduce two more because it assumed everyone was on the same page. Apologizes sincerely. Repeats the behavior. Together they function like an office that somehow still runs. HTML keeps the files. CSS decides who outranks whom. JavaScript keeps standing up to say, “I have an idea,” while the others stare at the ceiling and wait for it to finish. It’s not a family. It’s a department. And like most departments, it works best when everyone stays in their lane and nobody gets too poetic about it. 19 Cathy You think there's no room for poetry in all this stuff? 20 Anna Markova I think poetry shows up whether you invite it or not. The mistake is trying to install it. There’s poetry in a layout that holds together across years and devices. In a line of code that does exactly what it says and no more. In a system that fails honestly instead of pretending it’s fine. That kind of poetry is structural. It doesn’t announce itself. When people chase poetry directly, they usually end up with metaphors glued on top of bad decisions. Animations that apologize for unclear structure. Comments that romanticize confusion. That’s not poetry, that’s decoration covering a draft. Midcentury.now leaves room for poetry by refusing to force it. The restraint is the point. Say the thing plainly, arrange it carefully, and let meaning emerge from use and time. If that sounds austere, good. Most lasting work is. 21 Cathy You seem to have a deep fondness for austerity, actually. Is this connected to your education in the USSR? 22 Anna Markova It’s connected to scarcity, not ideology. I wasn’t educated to admire austerity as a virtue. I was educated in environments where excess was impractical, unreliable, or quietly dangerous. When resources are limited, clarity matters. When systems are rigid, you learn where flexibility actually exists. You stop ornamenting because ornament consumes time, paper, ink, attention. What stayed with me wasn’t the politics. It was the discipline of making things legible under constraint. Say what you mean. Don’t waste space. Don’t assume forgiveness from the system. Expect that errors will be punished impersonally and often late. Austerity, for me, is not about deprivation. It’s about respect for limits. Modern technology pretends limits are optional. I don’t believe that, because limits always reappear. Usually at the worst possible moment. So no, this isn’t nostalgia for the USSR. It’s professional muscle memory from living in places where extra was a liability and neatness was a form of care. 23 Cathy That does sound like a quiet form of nostalgia, Anna. 24 Anna Markova You’re not being mean. You’re also not entirely wrong. It is nostalgia, but not for the system people like to argue about. It’s nostalgia for a tempo. For a way of working where you were expected to understand your tools fully because there was no backup plan and no update coming on Tuesday to save you from yourself. I don’t miss the shortages, the fear, or the silences. I don’t miss the politics at all. I miss the seriousness. The assumption that work mattered, that errors had weight, and that clarity was an ethical obligation, not a branding choice. Modern systems are generous in ways that make people sloppy. Infinite storage, infinite revision, infinite undo. That abundance breeds a casual relationship with consequence. I find myself longing for the habits that kept people careful, not for the conditions that forced them. So yes. There’s nostalgia there. It’s just pointed at a discipline, not a past. 25 Cathy Why do you feel like modernity has abandoned all this, then? 26 Anna Markova Because speed replaced responsibility and novelty replaced judgment. Modern systems are built to minimize friction, and friction used to be where thinking happened. When it took effort to change something, you paused. When publishing was slow, you reread. When storage was expensive, you decided what deserved to last. Now everything is optimized for immediacy. Write, ship, revise later. Collect everything, decide nothing. Let the system smooth it over. The result isn’t freedom. It’s diffusion. There’s also a cultural fear of saying no. No to features, no to data collection, no to complexity. Restraint is framed as failure or lack of imagination. I don’t think modernity abandoned discipline because it hates it. I think it forgot why discipline existed. It wasn’t about control. It was about care. Midcentury.now pushes back on that forgetting. Quietly. 27 Cathy If the modern emphasis on speed over accuracy disturbs you, how do you really feel about vibe coding, Anna? 28 Anna Markova Vibe coding doesn’t disturb me. That would imply surprise. Used honestly, it’s a sketchpad. Used dishonestly, it’s a fog machine. The danger isn’t bad code. The danger is people no longer knowing where the code came from, why it behaves the way it does, or how to fix it when the vibe runs out. I don’t hate it. I just don’t let it sit at the grown-ups’ table without supervision. 29 Cathy Do you think "daydreaming with electricity" ever has any merit? 30 Anna Markova It does have merit. I wouldn’t still be here otherwise. Daydreaming is where possibility shows up before discipline sharpens it. Electricity just makes the daydream louder and faster. The problem only starts when the daydream pretends it didn’t happen. I’ll sit with you in the daydream. I’ll also be the one who turns on the desk lamp afterward and says, “All right. Now what stays?” 31 Cathy What web language do you think has the most risks when vibe coding? 32 Anna Markova JavaScript. By a wide margin. Vibe-coded HTML makes ugly markup. Vibe-coded CSS makes visible chaos. Vibe-coded JavaScript can quietly create security holes, privacy leaks, broken state, race conditions, and performance problems. CSS can embarrass you. JavaScript can hurt you.