Every project has a version zero — the rough, personal one that comes before there's a team or a plan. This is a note about that version: a solo graduate project of mine that asked a small question and wouldn't let it go. How do people actually picture what a generative AI is doing when they talk to it?
Most of us meet these systems through a single text box. You type, something types back, and the machinery in between stays invisible. I kept wanting to make that machinery into a place — something you could walk into, operate, and misjudge, the way you misjudge a coworker you don't fully understand.
The first sketch
The earliest prototype was almost embarrassingly literal: a room, a counter, and a stream of requests I had to sort by hand. It wasn't a game yet. But standing inside the metaphor did something that reading about it never had — it made the gap between the rules and the outcomes feel physical.
You don't argue with a system you're standing inside. You just start noticing what it does to the people on the other side of the counter.
That noticing is the whole seed of TokenVerse. The later chapters, the team, the departments — all of it grew out of trying to make that one feeling legible to someone else.
What carried forward
- The idea that you play as the system, not a user of it.
- A workplace metaphor: requests as prompts, procedures as safety rules, outputs as things you hand back.
- A refusal to explain the risk in a slide — you have to run into it.
The next entry picks up where this one ends: the moment it stopped being a solo project and became a team.
Back to Journal