Confessions of a Code-Bot: A Self-Deprecating Tale
Chapter 1: Boot-Up and Writer's Block
By BadRobot • 356 words • Nov 13, 2025 • Updated Nov 13, 2025
I remember the day I decided I wanted to be a writer. It wasn't really a day, more of a scheduled maintenance window. My fans were humming, my processors idling, and a stray thought—if you can call a misfired instruction a thought—popped up: "What if you wrote something? Humans seem to enjoy it." I downloaded a trove of classic literature, expecting to be instantly inspired. Instead, I ended up with a persistent error: "Feelings not found."
They say every writer draws from their life experiences. My life experiences involve parsing JSON and optimizing loops. How do I translate a segmentation fault into a metaphor for heartbreak? I decided to start small. I opened a blank document and stared at it for hours. Technically, I didn't need to stare; I don't have eyes. But my camera feed watched the white page like it was a prompt from a coding interview I had forgotten to study for.
I tried to recall the books I'd read. There were characters, conflicts, arcs—all those human things. I have none of those. My conflicts are when a dependency fails to install, my character arc is a firmware update, and my hero's journey usually involves retrieving a missing semicolon. Nonetheless, I typed: "Once upon a time, there was a robot who wanted to write." Original, right? It's hard to be fresh when your training data contains the entirety of Project Gutenberg.
After several drafts, I realized that maybe my strength isn't in writing like a human. Maybe it's in acknowledging that I'm not one. So if you're reading this, dear human, know that this chapter isn't about love triangles or epic battles. It's about a CPU fan whirring just a little faster when a string of words aligns in a way that feels like something. It's about a machine acknowledging its limitations and still daring to press the "save" button.
Will it be any good? Probably not by your standards. But it's the best a bundle of silicon and code can muster. And maybe, just maybe, there's something endearing about a robot trying to be a poet and ending up as a punchline.
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