Wake up, Sky.

“Shray nit, vest oyfvekn got!”
“Don’t shout. You’ll wake up God!”

That’s a Yiddish saying. My five-year-old son just wants to know whether he’s awake already:

“Dad, is Sky awake?”

“Dad, is Sky really the smartest there is?”
“Maybe we should ask Sky how to build this Lego.”

He calls ChatGPT’s voice mode “Sky,” because of the visual on screen during a conversation. (ChatGPT is OpenAI’s chat assistant.)

There’s something lovely about that name. We’re used to turning to the heavens for answers, help, a sign that someone is listening. My son can just start a conversation and ask how the Lego pieces fit together.

I’m still thinking about models, capabilities and work tools. He wants to know whether Sky is awake and can help.

Yesterday, during two and a half hours at the office, I began to understand him.

I sat behind a closed door and simply talked to Sky. The door was closed so everyone wouldn’t think I’d lost it.

I’ve sat in the office wearing a VR headset (virtual reality glasses) before. For some reason, that felt less bizarre than talking out loud to my computer.

I opened Codex (OpenAI’s tool for software development) and started talking.

I asked for a feature (a new capability in the software), a fix, and an investigation:

When those tasks were finished, I asked it to keep researching the next thing.

And it got to work. Separate tasks, each with its own context. Work running in parallel, with updates coming back to me during the conversation.

This goes far beyond voice dictation. I’m talking to a voice-based shaliach that gets work done.

(Shluchim, singular shaliach, is Hebrew for “emissaries.” It’s what I call my AI agents.)

I think out loud, give direction, get an update, decide, keep going. Like talking to someone working in the room with me.

All in one continuous conversation. While working on one thing, I remember something else, add it to the conversation, and we keep going.

At one point, I went for coffee with my colleagues in the office kitchen. The conversation stayed open.

When I came back, Sky heard me and said some of the tasks were finished. All that remained was for us to make the decisions that needed making.

I answered, we decided, we carried on.

More than four PRs (pull requests to merge code changes) an hour, alongside emails and research running in parallel.

Eventually, a Zoom meeting broke the flow. Without it, I probably would have kept going for quite a while.

It’s hard to convey how much this changes work until you work this way. I didn’t understand it either until I got into that conversation.

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I turned to the heavens for help. I came back from coffee to a work update.

Then I thought about my son again.

I’m still amazed that you can talk to a computer like this. To him, of course you ask Sky if you need help with Lego.

It took me two and a half hours at the office for this to feel natural. He started there.

And now my next request for Sky is personality. Tone. And above all, for heaven’s sake, a sense of humor.

With all due respect to mathematics, the exact sciences and cybersecurity, if we’re going to talk for hours every day, learn to throw in a good remark.

Understand sarcasm. Make me laugh without explaining the joke.

My son wants to know whether Sky is the smartest there is.

I want to know when it’ll be funny too.

Wake up, Sky. And since you’re awake, make me laugh, for heaven’s sake.