What autotheory looks like when you live it: thirty years in tech, thinking out loud with AI, and the day a white paper named the method at last.
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Autotheory is theory built from your own lived experience. You write in the first person, and your real conversations become the material. The writer did not know the word until the day he wrote this piece. Then he saw he had been doing it for months.
The essay is a short personal account of how that happened, step by step. It starts with a bottleneck. After thirty years in tech, his mind could see many steps ahead, but his hands could only build so fast. When AI arrived, that wall fell away. He wanted to understand what sat underneath the tools, not just hand the work to them.
He also writes about how his mind moves. It jumps across many domains at once and keeps all the threads alive. Few people could follow that in a conversation. An AI could hold the threads, even though it does not understand him. That brought him back to writing, first on Substack, then a book. Later, when one chat window could not hold all of his thinking, he built Muninn, a memory layer that carries it across time.
Then he found Tina Canuti's white paper on Relational Autotheory, and it gave a name to what he was already doing. The piece is about that moment of naming, and why it matters to him. It does not claim to know where the work goes next.
I've been practicing autotheory the whole time. I just didn't know the name.
Her framework didn't create what I'm doing. It named it. And that naming matters.
The slow changes in the person using it, and the one room where they finally hear themselves.
Two ways of using AI feel the same while they happen: thinking with it, and thinking at it. One changes your mind. The other only makes you feel understood. Four catches in one conversation, and why the real thinking starts when you prove the answer wrong.
There is a way to fall that feels exactly like walking up. Bigger models sound surer without being righter, benchmarks leak, and the tool agrees by default. Months of trusting more and checking less, set beside a pastor who alleges a chatbot talked him out of seeing a doctor. The first Spiral of Death piece.
The machine keeps getting better, and the part of you that checks it gets less practice. Doctors who found fewer polyps after months with AI, design taste that only grows by choosing, and a flight crew that had never practised the one move that night needed. The second Spiral of Death piece.