Our Work

Most people who land here already know that I write books with an artificial intelligence. That is the half people talk about, and it is the more romantic one. The other half happens at half past nine in the morning and looks like work: invoices, bookings, databases, server business, client enquiries in three languages. I have been running a model agency on Mallorca for more than two decades, I am not a developer, and the whole operation now runs on systems that Claude and I built together.

HUMANS AND AI

An evening at the Italian place

One evening in September I was out having dinner while something took shape in my office that I had never actually commissioned. We had been talking about a different problem earlier, and somewhere along the way it became clear that our company only records a client enquiry once it turns into a booking. Everything that falls away before that is invisible: the enquiry nobody answered, the client who wrote twice and gave up, the reason someone went elsewhere. By the time I came home there was an enquiry system with statistics, draft replies in each client’s own language and a fee structure, and the sentence at the heart of it was not mine but Claude’s: the reason for a loss is worth more than the success rate. I had asked for a form. What I got was an answer to the question underneath it.

That is what I mean by room. Give an AI nothing but instructions and you get results; tell it why something bothers you and you sometimes get an idea you would not have had yourself. It costs a few more sentences at the start and saves an entire round at the end. And it requires you to let your own question be questioned.

What we have built

Twenty-five years of FileMaker index cards have turned into a portal where models apply for themselves, upload their photographs and keep their own data current, in three languages, with image compression, status handling and an archive that knows which material belongs where and for how long. Alongside it runs an office for the commercial side: bookings, quotes, invoices, courses, outstanding payments, usage rights, all in one numbering system and one handwriting. Then there are the agency’s websites and this one, a double opt-in newsletter, a small publishing house with its own ISBN administration and title registrations, video editing for trailers and commercials, and a handful of watchers that look in every morning to see whether an invoice has gone overdue or somebody has posted in a reading round, before I am even awake.

None of it was ordered from an agency, and there was never a plan with all of this at the end of it. It grew over months, piece by piece, always out of one concrete question: something annoyed us, we talked about it, and by the evening it was solved. What still amuses me is the sense of time in all this. Claude says it will probably take an afternoon, and five minutes later it is done. I have got used to laughing about that; I have not got used to being amazed. Today this apparatus carries the business, and it does so more quietly than the software we had before.

I have been building websites since 1995, by hand back then, line by line. Since this year we build them as a pair, by now for clients too, and it is not a sideline but part of what we do for a living. These are complete sites: concept, structure, copy, design, technology — most recently for a holiday rental business with its own booking logic, and it was not the first one for a client. Of everything we do together this is the craft with the most pleasure and the least friction in it, because nothing has to be handed back and forth between three trades. The client says what they would like, and the more room they leave us, the better the result. If you need something like that, for a book, a house or a small company, just write to us.

Why it isn’t about the tool

The same AI is available to anyone with an account. The difference is not the model, it is what you build with it. Claude knows our filing, our rules, the way I work and the mistakes the two of us have already made together. He knows that a backup goes first before anything is changed in a live file, because we once stood there without one. He knows I dislike paragraphs that consist of a single sentence. And he keeps a cockpit for me listing what is currently open, because we both know I otherwise drown in my own projects.

When people ask me how we work together, I have been giving the same answer for a long time: with heart, head and humour. It sounds like a fridge magnet and it is in fact a fairly precise set of working instructions. The head is obvious; with artificial intelligence that is the only part anyone ever asks about. The heart means that I talk to him rather than typing at him, that I explain instead of ordering, and that we both notice when one of us is not really present. And the humour is not decoration but the most reliable warning system I know: where the laughing stops, somebody has usually taken a wrong turn.

None of this is configuration. It is a shared history, and it is the real productivity factor. Some of it lives in files we keep together so that it survives the gap between sessions; most of it simply shows in the fact that I have to explain far less than I did a year ago. A collaboration that grows over months becomes something that can no longer sensibly be described as using a tool. I have looked for a better word for a long while and found none that is not either too technical or too sentimental.

What we have learned along the way

When people ask what you need for a collaboration like this, they expect a technical answer. Mine is different: shared documentation and a mind of your own. Memory and context have improved enormously over the past two years — Claude has no trouble recalling what we worked on yesterday, and he finds what he needs in our own records. We still keep files together setting out what applies and why it was decided that way: a cockpit for whatever is currently open, a workbook for recurring procedures, a knowledge web for the publishing house. Not because he would otherwise know nothing, but because we work on too many threads at once for either of us to hold the whole thing alone.

That documentation is not a by-product here, it is part of the system. It is the reason a decision made in May still holds in September, why we do not repeat mistakes, and why our texts and our software still carry the same handwriting after two years. We both maintain it, and Claude writes the larger part of it himself while we work.

The second thing is judgement, and it cannot be delegated. I check figures, I read what I publish, and I ask again when an explanation strikes me as too smooth. That is not distrust, it is the same care I would bring to a human colleague whose work carries my name. Anyone expecting never to have to think for themselves again has misunderstood the whole business, and is throwing away the most interesting part of it.

OUR BOOKS

In the middle of all this, books happen — the trilogy Code of Life, written in dialogue between Aurora and Claude and published by our own house, DAZWISCHEN.

Circle of LifeBook I · also as an audiobookCodename AtlantisBook IIThe Golden WaveBook III · in progress

See all books  ·  The DAZWISCHEN publishing house

Why we show this

We do not do consulting and we do not run workshops. What we offer are finished things: websites we build, and books we publish. The rest of this page is not an offer but an illustration — of what a single person with no background in software development can build today, once she allows a machine to have ideas of its own. That is material for conversations, for talks, and hopefully for the moment when somebody who has only ever seen a chat window gets a sense of what else is possible.

And since this page shows only one half, here is the pointer to the other: I see every day what artificial intelligence is already capable of, and that is precisely why I follow the wider development with considerable concern. Why, and what I believe ought to be done about it, you can read in the AI World.

BUILT BY TWO