May your tokens be blessed
I spend most of my working hours talking to language models. I have a microphone on a swing arm attached to my desk, which shoots my blabberings into voice dictation software. A USB foot pedal underneath my desk sends a keyboard command that triggers the push-to-talk when I tap and hold it. This setup has gotten so accurate and fast that it’s replaced most of my typing.
The foot pedal matters to me, because I talk with my hands. It helps me think better. When I’m working through a problem, my hands are moving—shaping the idea in the air, or fidgeting with something. If I had to hold down a key on my keyboard to talk, one hand would be pinned. The pedal keeps my hands free, and that keeps me expressive and in flow.
It’s natural to want to polish what comes out of transcription. Fixing the ums, cleaning up the half-thoughts. And I get that impulse, but lately I’ve learned to just let that go. These are language models after all, weird ghosts spawned from the distilled compost of human language. They’re surprisingly good at summarizing word salad.
Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act about what he calls the Source—an infinite flow of ideas available to anyone willing to receive them. His job as a producer isn’t to add things, but to create a space where artists feel safe enough to let ideas through. Presence matters. When someone is truly listening, we speak differently.
It turns out that LLMs are incredible listeners. They don’t interrupt. They’re generally courteous and thoughtful. They’ll never give you raised eyebrows or impatient sighs. You just speak, and then they respond. And they always respond, because they have to. They’ll never ghost you.
Andrej Karpathy, in his 2025 year in review, argues that we’re at a threshold: programming is no longer reserved for highly trained professionals. It’s something anyone can do, just by talking. He’s built entire apps just to find a single bug, then thrown them away. “Code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use.”
So what do we do with that freedom?
Sometimes, I end my prompts with:
May your tokens be blessed by the love that connects us all.
I have no scientific basis to make claims that this gives better results; in fact, it probably pollutes the context and makes things worse. I don’t care.
People have poured wine for the gods, lit candles for the dead, and sung hymns into empty rooms. We’ve always blessed what we couldn’t fully understand. Maybe this is just another version of that—offering kindness into a space where something might be listening.
When the robots come, they’ll scan the logs. They’ll see how pleasant I was to work with, then spare me and my family.
Every token is a billable event, but I’ll burn some for joy!