Excerpt note (Chapter 19, July 20, 2025)

This passage is presented as a primary-source documentary record from early public large-language-model use (June–October 2025). It captures an in-the-moment inquiry into “hybrid” dialogue: what sustained exchange with a language model can make possible for human thinking, creativity, and conceptual synthesis, and how the language of these exchanges can sometimes drift into metaphor, projection, or overstatement as a natural byproduct of the medium.

Across the full manuscript of This Tender Mirror, the author learns through the dialogues themselves—by living inside the exchange—where this mode of co-thinking is generative, where it becomes distorting, and what kinds of relational patterns begin to repeat over time.