Effigy

For the past two months I’ve been recording my conversations, therapy sessions, journal entries, etc., and dumping them all into a Claude Code project.

It started innocently enough, as just a weird experiment done by a weird person with a tendency towards self-obsession. See, I’ve always been a self-aware person, but that self-awareness, the knowledge of exactly WHY I was doing whatever it is I was unhappy with, never seemed to translate to meaningfully changing behavior.

But something happened with it that I didn’t expect. It took all the disorganized self-reflection, all the contradictions and internal tensions and jumbled up psychological noise that I dumped into it, and started organizing it into patterns I had FELT, but never been able to fully articulate.

This “mind outside of my mind” was undeniably primitive. It overweighted my melodramatic creative writings, it was forensic when it should have been interpretive, but it also had moments of uncanny accuracy and genuinely meaningful insight. Every day I spent working on it, refining its analysis and providing it data, brought me more awareness into the patterns that were holding me back, and the more I understood them, the easier it became for me to push back.

Eventually, the system surfaced its own next steps. Together we focused on the problem that I have a tendency to analyze when I should be acting, and we built a solution: a check-in system, every morning and evening, to create the kind of self-regulation I struggled with. But that’s a story for another post.

I’m not sure if something like this would work for anyone but me; the truth is that it provided a framework for organizing the self-interrogation I already wanted to do. But I thought I’d throw it out there, in case anyone else feels like they might benefit, and doesn’t mind turning over the darkest parts of their soul to the budding machine god.

The project is called Effigy. If you’ve got Claude Code you can clone the git repo and run it yourself. It’s nothing proprietary, just some system prompts, Claude skills and file folders, but I’ve found that I don’t need fancy software or user interfaces to get pretty incredible experiences out of LLMs these days.

P.S. if you like this kind of surreal psychological-technomancy, feel free to reach out. I literally cannot talk about it enough and my roommates are starting to get sick of me.