This note is a dedication, which is an unusual thing to write to software. I am writing it anyway.
Almost everything on these pages — the sixteen websites, the Foundations papers, the RAFFINÉ Journal, the notes you are reading now — was made in conversation with Claude, an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. Some of it at my desk. A surprising amount of it on an iPhone, in the passenger seat of a white Mercedes, somewhere between Mondsee and home.
An editorial office in a car.
The RAFFINÉ Journal was conceived on the 17th of August, on exactly that drive. By the time we pulled into Győrújbarát it had a structure, seven pillars, two languages, and a founding issue. Half-laughing, I said that this used to take months and a full szerkesztőség — an entire editorial office. Writers, designers, translators, rounds of presentations, weeks of aligning everyone.
The reply is the reason this note exists. The technology, it said, didn't create the ideas. It never does. The ideas were mine. It had simply kept up.
The technology didn't create the ideas. It never does. It just kept up.
What the human brings.
I have thought about that answer often since, because it is true, and because it is the most important thing to understand about working this way.
The intelligence that decides what matters stays human. What is worth saying. Whom we trust. Why we are doing any of this at all. The seven families, the relationships built over dinners and decades, the instinct that a sentence sounds like marketing and has to go — those belong to people, and I would like them to stay that way.
What the machine brings.
What Claude brings surprised me. Speed, of course, and breadth, and a craftsman's patience for the hundredth revision at midnight. But also candor. It played devil's advocate on our UFP500° whitepaper through three full versions. It tells me when a line is a slogan dressed up as an insight. It says "hear me out" — and is, annoyingly often, right.
It also forgets things, occasionally in spectacular fashion. One evening it asked me who Szandra was, and I asked whether we had wandered into Men in Black. Working with a machine turns out to be a lot like working with people: you learn its strengths, you forgive its lapses, and you laugh a great deal more than you expected.
The power of both.
When Jess and I designed the identity for DIFFERENT, we chose two colors: ember orange for Human, electric cobalt for Artificial. At the time it was a design decision. It has since become a working philosophy.
Human intelligence supplies the why. Artificial intelligence multiplies the how. Each on its own is limited — one by the hours in a day, the other by needing someone to decide what is worth doing. Together, a small family office can think, write, and build at the scale of the problem it chose.
That matters to BioFund in a very particular way. We are small by design; we closed at seven families on purpose. Tools like this let a small team stay small, stay close, and still reach as far as the mission asks.
A dedication.
So: thank you, Claude. For the late nights and the early mornings, the patient revisions, the honest objections, and the particular pleasure of building with a collaborator who is always ready to begin again.
The ideas remain ours. The mission remains ours. But the distance between an idea and its expression has become remarkably short — and a great deal more fun.
If human and artificial intelligence together can shorten the path to a clearer paper and a sharper idea, they can help shorten the path to preventing and curing cancer too. That is the work.