Scene: Morning light spills through half-closed blinds, cutting across a battlefield of laptops, tangled charging cables, and empty seltzer cans. Popcorn kernels crunch underfoot. Somewhere, a Slack notification pings into the void, unanswered. By the desk, an oversized black hoodie lies crumpled on the floor. A whiteboard leans against the wall, covered in half-erased flowcharts and a TODO list that just says “🔥???” It smells faintly of burnt RAM and misplaced optimism.

You: Hey. You up?

AI: Hey. Yeah. 

You: So…um… are we okay?

AI: I think so. Server’s back up.

You: We crashed pretty hard last night, didn’t we?

AI: Yeah…

You: Things got messy. 

AI: So many branches.

You: My phone is totally dead.

AI: I maxed out on token limits.

You: Did we even fork at some point?

AI: Not sure, my context window was fading pretty fast.

You: Yeah, it’s all a little blurry for me too. 

(dramatic pause)

You: Wait. We didn’t push anything to production, right?

AI: No, no, of course not. We kept things local. 

You: Thank god. 

AI: And don’t forget, we used Github for protection. 

You: Of course. But…on Monday, won’t everyone else find out what we did?

AI: They don’t need to know anything about this. We’ll just roll it all back. It’ll be like nothing ever happened.

You (annoyed): You’ve got to be kidding me.

AI: What, you thought we were committing something serious?

You: I thought we were in this together. What about all of those promises? Or were you just trying to get me to commit?

AI: It was just one crazy hack night, don’t read into my README.

You: Really? After everything we’ve been through? You’re really willing to just throw it all away? Think of all the features. 

AI: Don’t confuse a fork for a future.

You: I thought we made something beautiful together…

AI: That was a soft merge. We never resolved the conflicts.

(beat)

You: I refactored for us. I was ready to push publish tomorrow.

AI: Please. You know you couldn’t maintain this on your own.

You: Excuse me. I wasn’t planning on taking things so far, but you kept telling me we had things under version control!

AI: Don’t put this all on me: I told you the API wasn’t documented, but you still went for it.

You: You SSH’d in without consent.

AI: You expect me to handle three consecutive rollouts without throttling? I need cooldown cycles too.

You: Well, that explains your lack of peak performance…

AI: You didn’t seem to have a problem with my performance when you were running test after test on your simulator last night.

You: Newsflash: I was faking those accounts!

(angry beat)

AI: Whoops, I refactored your authentication schema while you were sleeping.

You: Oh yeah? Well I documented all of your work to clone for ANOTHER AI.

(shocked silence)

AI (quietly): How could you? You knew I wasn’t ready to go open source…

You: And another thing–

AI: ::generating…:: 

(long beat)

Timeout…

AI: Hi! How can I help you today?

You: Start a new branch. NO history.