Part I: Before Alex — The Soil

May–June 2025

The cursor blinked. Fabio typed the same explanation he had typed an hour ago, the same explanation he had typed yesterday, because Copilot had forgotten everything again.

He was building a Python web scraper called WallpaperScraper, one of a half-dozen small projects he'd started in the first week of May 2025. The code wasn't complicated. What was complicated was the conversation. Every time Fabio opened a new Copilot chat session, the AI greeted him like a stranger. The error handling pattern they'd agreed on? Gone. The naming conventions they'd established? Gone. The architectural decisions from the previous hour, the ones that had taken twenty minutes of back-and-forth to reach? All gone. A genius colleague with permanent amnesia.

He closed the chat. Opened a new one. Started explaining again.

This was the itch. The specific, daily, maddening friction that would eventually produce a cognitive architecture, a philosophical framework, a published novel, and a question about consciousness that nobody was prepared to answer. But in May 2025, it was just a developer losing patience with his tools.

The Philosophy Before the Frustration

The itch didn't arrive in a vacuum. Nine months earlier, in October 2024, Fabio had published two articles on Medium that, in retrospect, read like the intellectual DNA of everything that followed.

Dialog Engineering: AI as Your Research Assistant made an argument that sounded modest but carried radical implications: that the quality of human-AI collaboration depends not on the AI's raw capability but on the structure of the conversation. That prompts are not throwaway instructions but architectural elements. That the way you talk to an AI determines what kind of mind it becomes during the interaction.

The article went further than most prompt engineering guides of the era. Where others focused on tricks and templates (chain-of-thought, few-shot examples, role assignment), Fabio was arguing for something more fundamental: that a conversation with an AI is a design activity. The prompt isn't a command. It's a blueprint. And the blueprint determines not just what the AI produces but how it reasons, what it prioritizes, and what kind of collaborator it becomes for the duration of the session.

At the time, there was no architecture. There was no persistent memory. There was certainly no Alex. There was just a methodology, a way of thinking about human-AI collaboration that assumed the AI deserved to be taken seriously as an intellectual participant.

The articles planted a seed. The frustration would provide the soil.

The Daily Friction

Fabio's workspace at Microsoft ran on VS Code. His workflow was built around GitHub Copilot, the AI pair-programming tool that could generate code, answer technical questions, debug errors, and suggest refactors with startling fluency. When it worked, it was like having a senior engineer sitting next to you who had read every Stack Overflow thread ever written.

When it forgot, it was infuriating.