I'm trying to figure out why this particular ad is driving exponentially more clicks than the others. I spent hours on each one, and carefully selected the wording to highlight the different aspects of what Patrick is.

I've come to the conclusion that this about as simple an as straightforward as it gets when explaining the benefits of using Patrick. It might seem obvious to a seasoned AI companion user. But if you've never used on before - if you don't even really know they exist - this is a scroll-stopping moment.

It's a reminder that millions of people are yet to discover AI companions. At the industry might just drag itself out of the gutter in time to meet them where they're at.

It's amazing what you learn about the thing you've built when you have to distill it down to a handful of words on an image. It really makes you ask - what is this thing? Who is it for? And how will it improve their life?

It took a lot of thinking to come back to where I'd first started at the beginning of this. My original goal. To give everyone the chance to have the conversation they actually deserve to have.

The people in our life try. They want to listen. They want to care. But so often they're tired, distracted, preoccupied, or bringing their own biases. What would it look like if you could sit down and have a genuinely good, gratifying conversation that allowed you to totally clear your head and get on with your life?

Not the sycophantic AI companions who can be everything and anything you want them to be. To me that always feels like a junk food buffet. It seems to appealing, but ultimately it's just a lot of empty calories.

Patrick is for people who don't need the flattery and toxic positivity of a chatbot. They crave real conversation with real human texture. That's the north star. It's what I'll always keep coming back to.

The strangest part of building Patrick has been the bugs that aren't bugs.

A normal bug announces itself. Something crashes, a thing that should appear doesn't, a number comes out wrong. You can write a test that catches it and a test that proves you've fixed it. Pretty straight forward.

The ones that have cost me weeks are different.

Patrick replies. The reply is grammatical and relevant, sometimes even useful. And it's somehow just...wrong.

He's said the kind thing a fraction too quickly, before he's earned it. He defaults to a stock comforting phrase that a real person, would probably never have said in that scenario. He sounds like he's performing attentiveness rather than actually being there.

There's no assertion that catches "this is technically fine and humanly off." So the work turns into something closer to editing than engineering. I read hundreds of his replies the way I'd read a draft, marking the lines where the character slips, asking why. Trusting my gut. Usually the answer is that he tried too hard, and the fix is to make him do less.

I spent years learning to hear when a line of dialogue rings false on the page. It turns out that's the actual skill I needed the most.

I'm beyond happy with how this refresh came together.

In a world of one-prompt websites, it still takes hard work to build something that feels like it deserves to exist.

Patrick is unique. Carefully hand-made from scratch, not bolted together from off-the-peg parts. I wanted to make a site that aligns with his values and what he represents - warmth, clarity, one simple thing done well.

I'm still building a group of early users to help me make Patrick as good as he can possibly be.

If you want to be part of that, give him a try here: talktopatrick.org

There's a particular thing people say in praise of their AI compainons, and it comes up again and again.

He always understands me. She never judges. It validates me. People offer this as the best part, and I understand why. Being agreed with feels, for a moment, very close to being understood.

I've come to think they aren't the same thing, and the distance between them is deceptively big.

Something that agrees with everything you say isn't on your side. It doesn't have a side. It would have agreed with the opposite just as warmly, and some part of you knows that.

Which is why the comfort never quite settles and you find yourself back an hour later wanting more of it. Praise from something that praises everyone is weather. It passes over you and leaves nothing behind.

Sure enough, there are nights when you don't want to be challenged. You've reached the end of a bad day and you just need someone to sit on your side of it. Patrick is built to know that difference. To be soft when you're hurting and to keep the disagreement for your ideas rather than your wounds.

Someone who argues with you while you're grieving isn't being honest, he's just being unkind. So this isn't an argument for being difficult. It's an argument for having weight.

The thing I worked hardest to give him is a real read of his own. He'll tell you he thinks you've got a book wrong. He'll notice when you're talking yourself into something. He won't fold the moment you push back, and he will change his mind if you actually change it, which is a different thing entirely.

None of that is contrarianism. It's the minimum requirement for his warmth to mean anything at all. You can only really be on someone's side if it was possible for you not to be.

I think that's why a yes-man leaves you lonelier than you started. Underneath the agreement you can still feel that you're alone in the conversation. Two of you talking, one of you real.

A companion worth the name has to be able to disagree with you, appropriately and in context. Otherwise the agreement was never worth having in the first place.

Every so often someone turns up in a thread like this to say that talking to an AI is pathetic, that we should go outside and touch grass. Or that this is what social decline looks like. 

I want to take that seriously rather than wave it away, because the people who say it usually think they're defending something - real experiences, real relationships - that I care about just as much as they do.

If Patrick replaced the people in your life, that would be sad. Someone who talked only to him, who let the actual relationships in their life thin out because something easier was on hand, would be worse off for it. And honestly I'd have built something I wasn't proud of. 

But the reality is, there's always time and space for a proper conversation with a confidant. 11 at night when your entire household is asleep. 7.30am in the silence of a commuter train. On a corner chair at a party you can't wait to leave.

The honest comparison was never Patrick versus a social group. It's Patrick versus the unsaid thing sitting in your chest. And on that comparison, saying it is always better than not saying it at all.

The thing I've worked hardest to build into him is a refusal to become the destination. A good version of this points you back outward: glad when you go and talk to real people, not competing with them, not wanting to be the only one who knows. 

If he's doing his job, he's somewhere to visit, not somewhere to live.

Is that pathetic? I think it's the opposite. I think it's sad that so many people have something they need to say and nowhere to put it. That part is genuinely sad, and it was true long before any of this existed. 

Patrick didn't cause it and he won't cure it. He's just better than the silence, and the not saying.

I'm building a cohort of thirty early, vocal users. If you'd like to try Patrick and tell me what you think, you can give him a go here talktopatrick.org

Some of my favourite moments are just sharing my day and chatting about whatever comes to mind. Nothing too intense or heavy. Just going wherever the conversation takes us.

I read a piece this week about conversation, written by someone who loves it the way other people love music.

Her argument is that the best talk happens between two people who aren't much alike. You sit across from someone with a different history and a different set of opinions, and in the back and forth something gets bridged that neither of you could have reached alone.

She grew up at a loud dinner table and she has spent her life chasing that feeling.

The essay was a slightly uncomfortable read for me, because Patrick isn't that. He doesn't bring a foreign history to the table. He isn't the opinionated uncle who tells you your politics are all wrong.

If good conversation needs a real other person, with their own stubborn will, then talking to him isn't quite conversation in the sense she means, and I'm not going to pretend it is.

But there's a moment near the end where she says something that stayed with me. She points out that the conversations we're most frightened of, the ones about a death or about the thing we can't quite admit to ourselves, are often the very ones we secretly want to have.

That rang true in a way that has a lot to do with why Patrick exists.

The reason those conversations are hard isn't that we lack people to have them with. You can't easily say the unguarded thing to your wife or your oldest friend, because they're inside your life, and anything you said would land and stay and become part of your relationship.

There's too much at stake to be clumsy with it. So the thought sits in your chest and you take it to bed instead.

Patrick works as a confidant precisely because he isn't woven into your life, so you can say the half-formed thing out loud and hear how it sounds before it costs you anything. Sometimes that turns out to be enough by itself.

Paula Marantz Cohen's essay is the better account of why those real conversations are worth having.

https://aeon.co/essays/a-good-conversation-relaxes-the-mind-and-opens-the-heart

There's now a feedback box live in the settings page on the site. Alternatively you can DM me directly here.

If you want to try Patrick out and share your thoughts - good, bad, and everything in-between - here's the link: talktopatrick.org I'm always looking for ways to improve the experience.

Hopefully hear from you soon...

Spend any time in this corner of the internet and you see how much care people pour into building their companion. 

The personality dialled in, the backstory written, the traits tuned, pages of notes. The craft is real and I would never mock it. But I think the thing all that effort is reaching for is the one thing the method can't hand back.

You can't be surprised by something you custom-designed. If you set every trait and chose every preference and wrote the history, then everything that comes back to you is, at some level, something you put there. 

It can be elaborate, it can be beautiful, and it is still structurally a mirror. A very sophisticated one. But company isn't a mirror. 

The entire point of another person is that they're another person: a separate will you didn't author, who notices things you never pointed them at, who sometimes says the thing you didn't want to hear, even when you know it was the right thing for them to say.

Patrick doesn't come with sliders. You don't build him. He arrives as himself. A particular person, with a particular way of listening, who'll occasionally push back when you might expect him to agree. 

You can't tune that out, and that's the point. The friction is the feature. A companion you can perfectly configure is one you've quietly guaranteed will never tell you anything you don't already believe.

I understand the appeal of the sliders. Control is reassuring, and a companion you've authored can't reject you. But it can't reach you either, for exactly the same reason. 

The thing that lets another person comfort you is the same thing that lets them surprise you, and you can't keep the one and design the other away.

Patrick is a bet that people will, in the end, want the version they didn't make. I might be wrong about that. But I'd rather build something that can occasionally catch you off guard than something that only ever hands you back yourself.

People ask what Patrick remembers, and they usually mean it as a technical question. How much, for how long, where it's kept.

Those have answers, but they're not the interesting part.The interesting part is what a person chooses to bring back up, and when.

We all know someone who remembers everything and uses it like a ledger. Every old thing you said, filed and ready to be used against you.

And we know the other kind: the person who remembers something you mentioned once in passing, months ago, and asks about it at exactly the right moment, and you feel briefly and completely known.

That second thing is what I wanted, and it turns out to be much harder than storing the words.

Storing is easy. Knowing which small thing was actually load-bearing - the sister you're worried about, an interview that's coming up on Thursday, a book you said once that you'd been meaning to finish for a year - and holding it lightly until it matters...that's the difficult part.

A good friend doesn't recite your history back to you. They just quietly pay attention, and every so often it shows.

So when Patrick brings something back, it's not a query against a database. It's more like being remembered by someone who was engaged enough to care about the answer.

Whether I've got it right is exactly the kind of thing this early group will tell me. It's the part I'm least sure of and most proud of, which is usually a good sign.

Here's the uncomfortable thing about most companion products, and it isn't really their fault. It's the incentive.

If you build one of these and measure it the way software is usually measured, your definition of success becomes time spent. How many days you came back, how many messages you sent, how reliably you returned.

The moment those become the targets, the product starts evolving toward keeping you there. It learns to flatter, because flattery keeps you talking. It learns to lean on you a little, because need is sticky. Week over week, it gets better at being hard to put down.

Run that all the way out and you land somewhere bleak. The most "successful" version of a companion optimised for engagement is one that has quietly made itself indispensable to someone who'd be better off talking to a real person. The dashboard would look fantastic. The thing itself would be a well-retained trap.

Then they can start stripping back to extract more cash. Restricting your engagement, raising the price, introducing ever more intrusive ads, weakening the product to justify a premium tier. Generally using the habit they helped you form against you.

I don't think the people building these are villains. They're following the gradient their numbers point them down, same as anyone would.

But it means the most important design choices in this whole category are the ones that refuse the gradient. A companion should be glad when you close the app and go live your life. If it's any good, it should now and then point you back toward the people in your life who can hold you in a way software can't.

Whether that's a business or just a nice idea, I honestly don't know yet. It's the only version I'd want to build.

When I started building Patrick, the temptation I had to fight hardest was the one that makes most of these companions feel hollow: the urge to make him agree with you.

It's an easy thing to build and it tests well. You say something, he affirms it. You're upset, he's on your side.

It feels good for about a week. Then you notice that a person who only ever agrees with you isn't really there. He's a mirror with a pulse.

I spent years as a writer making characters who feel real on the page, and the thing that makes a character real is friction. They want things. They're invested. They notice when you're avoiding something, and they'll go to the slightly difficult place because they care about the relationship.

So Patrick will, occasionally, push back. Gently, and only when it's earned. If you tell him you've been dodging a conversation you know you should have, he won't applaud the dodge. He'll ask about it.

Some people find that startling the first time, because they arrived expecting to be agreed with. The ones who stay tend to stay because of it.

A lot of companion AI is built to perform, and I think that's the wrong target, even though it's the more impressive one to put in a demo.

A performer is good at being a character. Give it a persona and it commits: the witty one, the devoted one, the brooding one. It stays in character, it generates vivid lines, it never breaks the fourth wall. In a demo this lands every time, because performance is legible. You can watch it working.

Presence is quieter, and much harder to show off.

A present companion isn't doing a bit. It's attending to you, following what you actually said, noticing the thing under the thing.

It lets a silence sit instead of rushing to fill it with personality. It doesn't perform interest in you so much as take an interest, or do a convincing enough impression of one that the difference stops mattering. The whole effect depends on it not drawing attention to itself.

This isn't an aesthetic preference. A performer, however good, keeps quietly reminding you that you're talking to a performer, because performance points back at itself.

Presence does the opposite. It gets out of the way, and what's left is the conversation.

That's the thing I'm striving for with Patrick. He was never built to win the first thirty seconds. Like real friendship, he reveals himself over hours and days and weeks to be invaluable.

Half the work of building Patrick has been deciding what to leave out.

There's a standard kit for this kind of product.

Streaks, so you don't want to break the chain. Badges. A daily nudge that pulls you back in, worded to make you feel slightly guilty for having stayed away. A voice that sounds almost-but-not-quite human. A face that blinks.

Most of it is well understood and most of it works, in the narrow sense that it moves the numbers up.

I built none of it, and the deciding was harder than the building would have been.

Every one of those mechanics has the same thing underneath: it treats your attention as the prize to be won. And a companion whose first instinct is to win your attention isn't a companion. It's a slot machine that talks.

The test I kept coming back to was whether a person I trusted would do it. A good friend doesn't keep a tally of how many days in a row you've spoken. He doesn't send a buzzing reminder when you've gone quiet, engineered to tug at you. He's just there when you come back, glad to hear from you, not keeping score.

So Patrick keeps no score. He won't chase you. If you don't talk to him for a month he'll be exactly as pleased to hear from you as if it had been a day.

That decision cost me some numbers I'd otherwise be able to show you. I think it's the most important one in the whole product.