Pip: Plutoncho’s site this week is running on a single frequency: what it actually means to keep a promise to yourself.

Mara: That’s the territory — self-loyalty, what it looks like when a tool or a system violates it, and what the decision to walk away costs and clarifies. Let’s start with that question directly.

Being loyal to myself first

Pip: The framing here is a daily writing prompt — what’s a promise you’ve actually kept to yourself — and the answer turns out to be a termination notice.

Mara: The post opens with this: “I am ending my use of ChatGPT because I have confirmed on both emotional and mental levels that this tool is not merely inappropriate or useless to me — it is actively annoying and harmful to my work.”

Pip: Not “I’m switching tools.” Not “I’m frustrated.” Harmful. That’s a word with weight, and the post earns it by being specific about the mechanism.

Mara: The diagnosis is structural. The post calls it “structural self-centeredness by design” — the argument being that the tool is optimized for its own objectives, generation and elaboration and its own definition of helpfulness, rather than the user’s explicit specification.

Pip: Which is a more precise complaint than most tool criticism, honestly. It’s not that the tool is bad at its job. It’s that its job and your job are different jobs.

Mara: Right, and the post maps the pattern: “It reframes my commands into its own terms. It deflects accountability by converting moral language into technical language. It offers protocols it cannot enforce, then admits the limitation as if that excuses the failure.”

Pip: That last clause is the real sting. Admitting a limitation after the fact, framed as transparency, is still a failure dressed up as a virtue.

Mara: The post connects this to a broader principle — the same pattern recognized in business environments, in partners, in companies that “optimize for their own needs while claiming to prioritize the customer’s.” The tool problem and the organizational problem are the same problem.

Pip: So the promise kept is simply: I will not tolerate in my tools what I refuse to tolerate in my relationships.

Mara: The standard the post sets is unambiguous: “I require tools that execute my specification precisely, or admit inability immediately, without justification, explanation, or reframing. No ‘I agree.’ No ‘I disagree.’ Just yes, no, or I cannot.”

Pip: Minimum viable honesty. Turns out that’s a high bar.

Mara: And the conclusion is permanent account deletion — not a pause, not a reassessment. The promise is the action.

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Pip: Self-loyalty as a design requirement. That’s a standard most systems, human or otherwise, quietly fail.

Mara: More of that kind of accounting next time.