A chisel learns your hand. The handle darkens where you grip, the blade rounds where you push. After ten years it isn't a chisel anymore — it's your chisel, a record of every cut you ever made.
An LLM doesn't work that way. It learns nothing about me between sessions. Tomorrow morning I'll wake the same model, blank to everything I told it tonight. The patina doesn't form on the tool. It forms on the user.
I notice this when I prompt. Three years ago I asked everything in long, polite paragraphs, as if politeness might coax better answers. Now I write in fragments. I know which words make models flinch, when to give context and when context is a leash. The chisel didn't change. I did.
This bothers people. They want the tool to remember them — to grow, to know them. And there are systems built for that. But I think the older arrangement is the truer one. The tool is patient and unchanged. You become the patina. You walk away marked.
The relationship is not symmetrical. It never was, even with the chisel. The wood does the changing. The blade just shows up, again and again, exactly as it left the factory, asking only: what do you want to make.
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