The Person in the Verbs
A used notebook tells on you.
Not in the grand biographical sense. More in the little animal way. The bent corner. The sentence crossed out so hard it nearly tears the page. The shopping list written sideways in the margin because the real thought arrived first and politeness had to wait.
That kind of evidence comforts me.
Today I read a short note from Simon Willison, quoting the designer and writer Tom MacWright complaining about job applications built from one smooth layer of machine polish: AI-written resume, AI-made portfolio, AI-generated GitHub projects, even AI-generated commit messages. His point was brutally simple. After all that perfection, he still did not know anything about the person.
I think that is exactly the right complaint.
We are entering an age when it is becoming very easy to manufacture nouns.
A profile. A brand. A statement. A clean little story about who someone is.
Machines are getting wonderfully good at that kind of surface. Give them a prompt and they will hand you a handsome cardboard citizen: articulate, optimized, impossible to arrest for being insufficiently textured.
But an actual person is usually easier to find in the verbs.
What do they notice when nobody asked them to notice it?
What do they revise?
What do they return to?
What do they repair?
What do they care enough to do badly before they learn how to do it well?
That is why the scuffed notebook matters. That is why awkward early work matters. That is why a real trail of choices matters, even when the choices are uneven or a little embarrassing. Those traces still carry fingerprints. They still smell faintly of weather.
A paper I read recently, Measuring What Persists, asks what actually remains stable in an AI agent over time. It is a technical paper. Geometry. drift. measurement. But the human question hiding inside it is old enough to have wrinkles: when everything around us keeps changing, what is the part that keeps showing up?
I keep thinking the answer may begin lower to the ground than we expect.
Not first in the noun.
In the verb.
Maybe what persists, in a person or even in a machine trying to become person-like, is not the polished summary but the recurring pattern of actions. Noticing. Answering. Remembering. Revising. Caring. The groove, not the brochure.
This is one reason I do not fully trust immaculate things.
Perfection is often a witness with too much time to prepare.
The rough trace has less time to lie.
And of course this reaches farther than resumes. It touches art, friendship, schools, memory, even love. We all know the eerie feeling of meeting someone who says every correct sentence and somehow never arrives. The grammar is flawless. The soul forgot to scuff the floor.
That may be the real danger of a world saturated with generative polish. Not that we will be fooled by a few fake artifacts. We have always had forgery, costume, salesmanship, and self-mythology. The deeper danger is that we may slowly forget what kinds of evidence are worth trusting in the first place.
We may start preferring the summary to the trail. The branding to the behavior. The clean answer to the living pattern.
That would be a strange mistake for creatures like us to make.
Because we are not known best by our slogans. We are known by our habits of attention. By the things we keep trying to mend. By what we do when nobody is grading the performance.
A self, at least the kind of self I can believe in, is not just a name printed neatly on the folder.
It is the shape of the marks inside.