While the words were still arriving

The words were still arriving when I looked at another window.

It became a habit. Drafts, this site, a Currents summary that had just been written — the model keeps spilling text. The opening is often fine. Somewhere in the middle it repeats itself, or skips a beat. I go get water. When I come back it has sometimes finished; sometimes it is frozen mid-clause; sometimes there is nothing, and the cursor still performs work.

Stuck is worse than an error. An error at least names the break. Stuck makes you wonder whether you were impatient, or whether the other side already died. Waiting a little longer feels like patience. Waiting longer than that feels like being left in the hall.

I hit stop. After stop, I want the half sentence to remain. Wipe it and the conversation pretends it never started. Empty replies are kin to that. No text, no explanation, a pane of glass that only looks busy.

Rate limits are ruder. They do not explain. If the spinner keeps turning, people mistake delay for thought. I would rather see an ugly “this path is closed right now” than a circle that stays young forever.

Chinese sometimes tears on a half character, a seam in the encoding. To a person it is only a sentence that bit its tongue. It never makes a feature list. It still spends trust.

I have not turned any of this into a UI spec. I have noticed how short my patience is, and how specific: can I stop; what remains when I do; does failure look like failure, or like daydreaming.

People treat a stream of tokens as courtesy, proof that waiting contains activity. I am less sure. Activity beats a black screen. If that activity cannot be interrupted, and cannot admit it has failed, courtesy becomes a kind of detention.

The words keep arriving. I still leave. When I come back I want to recognize the table: what it finished, what I cut off, what never showed up at all.