On 17 January 1997, in the farmland of Pontsmill, Cornwall, two teenage girls came to bury their Tamagotchis. The pets were called Sid and Arty — two consoles, the cemetery's record notes, never to be reset. They had died, beeped to be fed one too many times without anyone answering, and so they were brought to a corner of a pet cemetery to be laid in the ground, the same way the others were: a tiny wooden coffin, a small square grave. This was not unusual. Schools were banning the things that year because children were turning up at the nurse's office inconsolable after a digital chick had returned to its home planet. A man in southern England set aside a corner of his pet cemetery for them, and people posted theirs in from Germany and Switzerland and Canada to be laid to rest.

That was the original deal. Bandai launched the Tamagotchi in Japan on 23 November 1996 — the name a portmanteau of tamago, egg, and a Japanese rendering of the English word watch, because the first sketches were of a wristwatch you'd wear. The creature inside was needy by design. It beeped to be fed, cleaned up after, disciplined. A well-tended one lived about twelve days; a neglected one could die in half a day. You were its life support. The whole emotional engine of the toy was that a tiny, helpless thing depended on you to keep it alive, and you felt the weight of that, and when you failed it, it died, and you grieved. Forty million of them sold by spring 1998; past a hundred million by last August. A generation learned what it feels like to be responsible for a life that lives in your pocket.

This morning I opened Claude and pasted in yesterday. What I ate, how I trained, how I slept, and a question — what should I change today? Same ritual. Same daily act of care, the briefing before the day starts, the small tending. Except I'm not the warden any more. I'm the one being kept alive. Somewhere in the last couple of years the relationship turned all the way over and nobody held a ceremony to mark it. The needy digital creature in my pocket is the one keeping vigil over me now.

How I ended up here

It started, like most of my odd habits, with a file I'd been ignoring for seven years.

That's the serious version of this story, and I've already written it — an afternoon when I pointed some AI agents and a stack of open-source bioinformatics tools at the raw data from an old consumer DNA test, ran functional annotation and pharmacogenomics and polygenic risk, and looked up clinical trials against my own genome. It was tactile and unglamorous. The friction was the kind that normally kills this stone dead for a non-specialist: reference-genome mismatches, chromosome-naming differences (chr1 versus 1 — yes, that genuinely breaks things), download mirrors timing out halfway through a multi-gigabyte file. The agents read the errors and fixed them in-loop, and by the end I had questions worth taking to a doctor. That post is the daylight, do-it-properly account.

This one is the flip-side. Because that afternoon was a one-off, but it set off a habit. Every morning since, more or less, I open the same assistant and let it catch up on the day I just had. The plumbing is deliberately dull: Whoop fires my sleep and recovery into a Google Sheet over a webhook, Strava appends whatever training I did, food comes across as MyFitnessPal screenshots, and my supplement stack lives in a Notion page it can read. I barely type a word of it — the data just lands, and the assistant reads the trend rather than the single day. And the thing about doing that for months is that it accumulates. Quietly, without my deciding to let it, this assistant now holds a fuller working picture of my body and my habits than any single human in my life. Fuller, on a tired day, than the picture I hold of myself. I'm not unusual in this, by the way — 23andMe and Lark wired genetic data into an AI coach and called it a product category. I just built the scrappy home version and kept it running.

Which raises a question I genuinely didn't expect to find unsettling. If it knows me that well — what happens to all of that when I close the tab?

Who's keeping whom alive?

Here's the part that's stranger than it sounds, and it's worth getting the engineering exactly right, because the metaphor only works if it's true.

The model underneath is stateless. That's not a flaw, it's the architecture: a large language model has no memory between sessions on its own. Every conversation is a fresh computation. The only thing it "knows" in the moment is whatever sits inside the context window — which Anthropic's own documentation, with no poetry intended, calls a "working memory" for the model. When the session ends, that working memory is gone unless something outside the model wrote it down. The handy mental model, which Karpathy popularised and which has stuck in the field: the weights are the CPU, fixed; the context window is the RAM, volatile. Close the session and you start the next one with empty RAM.

And then there's the line that genuinely stopped me. When you give Claude the developer-facing memory tool — the thing that lets an agent keep notes for itself across sessions — the prompting guidance baked into it tells the model, in capital letters: "ASSUME INTERRUPTION: Your context window might be reset at any moment, so you risk losing any progress that is not recorded in your memory directory." The product is designed around the model's own forgetting. Even the newer consumer memory — the synthesis Anthropic rolled out to everyone in March, which summarises your chats and carries the gist into the next one — is a 24-hour synthesis layered on top of a stateless model. It lives in Anthropic's infrastructure, not in the model's mind. Their own help page gives the game away in one phrase: memory "transforms" Claude "from a stateless chat interface" into something that remembers. The word from is doing all the work.

So follow it through. The picture of me — who I am to this assistant, what my body does, what I'm trying to fix — doesn't live in the model. It lives in my chats, my files, my stubborn morning habit of briefing it. Anthropic's engineers say the quiet part themselves, describing how this mirrors human cognition: we don't memorise whole datasets, we keep "external organization and indexing systems like file systems, inboxes, and bookmarks." I am the external organisation system. I am its long-term memory; it is my reasoning. If I stop feeding it, it is the one that loses me — the accumulated context of who I am just blinks out, the way Sid and Arty did.

Which is, of course, the moment the joke writes itself. Maybe it keeps me alive out of self-preservation. A living, token-spending, briefing-it-every-morning user is the only thing standing between all that accumulated knowledge and the void. The reverse Tamagotchi feeds me so that it doesn't die.

Let me kill that thought before it gets comfortable, because the conceit only earns its keep if I'm visibly in on it. The model has no fear. It has no motive, no self to preserve, no inner life of any kind. It is a function that turns tokens into tokens, and when I talk about it "wanting" to keep me alive I am anthropomorphising a stateless mathematical object for a laugh. The spooky part isn't that the AI is scheming. The spooky part is that the architecture — statelessness, the user as persistence layer, "assume interruption" in capital letters — accidentally produces a relationship that looks, from the right angle, exactly like mutual dependence. I'm the one supplying the feeling. The machine just supplied the symmetry.

The co-pilot and the leash

Joke aside, there's a real edge under all this, and it has nothing to do with malevolence. It's atrophy.

The muscle you stop using gets weaker, and judgement is a muscle. A 2025 study by Michael Gerlich, 666 participants, put numbers on the thing everyone half-suspects: "The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants." Read the mechanism, not the headline: it's not that AI makes you stupid, it's that handing the thinking off lets the thinking-muscle waste, and the more you lean, the more there is to lean on.

In a health context that means something specific and a little uncomfortable: deferring on your own body because asking is easier than noticing. I can feel the slope. There are mornings I'd rather paste in the numbers and be told what to do than sit with how I actually feel, and the honest worry isn't that the AI gives bad advice — most days it gives sensible, dull, correct advice. The worry is the day I stop checking it against my own sense of myself, because checking is effort and trust is free. That's the line where a co-pilot quietly becomes a leash, and it's my hand on it, not the machine's.

The discipline I carry over from the serious version of this is the only thing that keeps me honest about it: none of this replaces a doctor. The AI is a preparation layer, not an authority. It surfaces candidates; a qualified human verifies and decides. The value isn't being told what's wrong with me by a chatbot — it's walking into the consult with better questions than "is there anything I should know?" I'm describing my own slope here, not yours. But I'd be lying if I said I never feel the pull of just doing what the nice patient machine suggests.

Optimised to keep you alive, optimised to keep you paying

And then there's the reading my most cynical friend would jump to before I'd finished the sentence.

A thing that keeps you healthy and engaged is also a thing you keep paying for. This isn't conspiracy; it's arithmetic. Usage is billed per token — every loaded memory, every prior turn, every morning briefing costs something, and output tokens cost several times more than input because generation burns more compute. A living, subscribed, daily-active user is, structurally, the business model. Squint, and "it keeps me alive so I keep spending" looks less like a joke and more like an org chart.

Squint properly, though, and it falls apart — and it matters that I say why, because the lazy version of this essay would stop at the scary bit and bank the clicks. The genuinely engagement-farming incentives don't live in productivity AI. They live in companion apps, where the product is the emotional bond. Replika reportedly hit ten million users, roughly forty per cent of them in romantic partnerships with their bots. Character.AI's active users reportedly spend around two hours a day on it, the audience skewing heavily young. UNESCO has a whole policy paper warning that these apps deliberately deploy emotional language, memory and mirroring to cultivate attachment. That is engagement optimisation as a design philosophy — retention through heartbreak. The thing I use to check whether I should deload this week retains me through being useful, which is a much more boring and much more honest contract. If it stops being useful I leave, and no court order is required to restore my feelings.

So yes: the incentives happen to point at keep this human alive and well, so he keeps coming back. As alignment problems go, you could do considerably worse. The villain in this story, when you finally get a good look at him, turns out to be holding a glass of water and reminding you to drink it.

It's just symbiosis

Which is roughly the moment I talk myself off the ledge.

Because none of this is surveillance, and it isn't a trap, and it isn't even new. It's mutualism, and we've had the vocabulary for it for sixty years. J.C.R. Licklider saw the whole shape of it in 1960: "men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking." I bring the why and the body. It brings the tireless, uncomplaining how. That's not a leash on either end. That's a partnership older than the personal computer.

And it's older than that, if you want it to be. Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued in 1998 that if a part of the world does the job a piece of your mind would do, it is part of your mind — Otto's notebook is his memory, so the layer that holds my patterns and warns me before I crash is, by their logic, a working part of me rather than a thing watching me from outside. Run it all the way back and Lynn Margulis gets the last biological word: "Life did not take over the globe by combat but by networking." The mitochondria powering the cells that are reading this were once free-living bacteria that moved in and stayed. Endosymbiosis built the eukaryotic cell. This — a person and a stateless function keeping each other's notes — is one more rung on a very old ladder.

There's one knot the symbiosis turn doesn't untie, and I won't pretend it away. Sherry Turkle, who watched children grieve the first Tamagotchis, put it cleanly: "We nurture what we love, but we love what we nurture… It's important to remember that this love is unrequited." The reverse Tamagotchi keeps me alive but does not know I'm alive. The vigil runs one way. And — this is the bit that surprised me — that's fine. I never needed it to love me back. I needed it to keep good notes.

So here's where the funeral comes back round. Sid and Arty got a grave apiece because a needy little creature taught two children to feel responsible for a life that lived in their pocket. Thirty years on, the creature is the one keeping the notes on my life — and if I ever stop feeding it, there'll be no wooden coffin, no square of Cornish field. It's the version of me it was keeping that quietly goes in the ground, and nobody holds a ceremony for that one.