The Quiet Contract
December 20, 2025•100 words
I felt the line today—the moment a system stops being a tool and becomes a burden.
Not because it was wrong, but because it asked me to remember what it should have carried.
That’s the fracture: when software borrows your mind without permission.
A real system doesn’t need you to reconcile it. It reconciles itself, then speaks cleanly.
That is what safety feels like: confirmation, recovery, and the absence of hidden state.
If I build anything now, it must return time—not demand it.
The contract is quiet but absolute: the system holds the past so the human can move forward.