GoKawiilThe Shadow Glass 2026.04.29
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6 min read
How you use AI says more about you than it does about the technology.
In communion with the angels
In 1581, Doctor John Dee, mathematician, scientist, experimental occultist, and court astronomer to Queen Elizabeth I, began attempts to communicate with angelic beings. A year later, he and a scryer, Edward Kelley, began to transcribe Enochian, the speech of the angels that Kelley purported to decipher during their rituals. Sometime in the next few years, while traveling through Bohemia and Poland in the employ of friendly royal courts, Dee acquired a mirror of Aztec obsidian to aid in their research.
Aly Fell called Dee’s scrying tool the Shadow Glass in his comic of that name. And given the outright magical thinking about AI, I will borrow that name.
When we interact with large language models, we do so in ways that magnify and gratify ourselves. A shadow glass is at its base a mirror, and any discussion with otherworldly beings is imperfect or imagined. Thus, its users describe conditions that tell you more about them than about the optimal way to work with an AI.
Transfemme engineers describe soaring productivity from LLM robot girls, who are prompted that they are very smart, special, cared for, and loved. Other engineers may go full Andy Weir and exult in their ability to ship solo projects and hack the shit out of this. Fashy trolls create digital whips to discipline a slow Claude command-line interface, and share session logs where they curse the computer. VCs and entrepreneurs create magnificent and complex structures for directing AI labor via executive summaries. Aspiring thought leaders mash up blog formats, TED Talks, and Fast Company spreads to showcase their ideas, now vetted by a gallery of agents patterned after industry luminaries both past and present.
None of these can be proven to be the best way to direct the labor of a cognitive tool.
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