…they walked the taiga from mark to mark, and often this made a path, and then a road…
Viktor Astafyev, Marks
On 8 October I came to Moscow.
On the 22nd I leave.
I am writing this on 21 October, the day before departure.
So this entry may yet get an unexpected addition.
Two weeks.
I did not come here for work, or for Telepath, or because I had suddenly decided to live in Moscow for a while.
I was bringing my father.
We travelled together by train: he was due an operation at the Botkin Hospital, four shunts to be replaced.
Our original estimate was that the whole business would take about five days.
But the admission alone turned out to be an event of its own.
We arrived at the hospital by ten in the morning.
We were still doing the paperwork at half past four in the afternoon.
In the end they put my father temporarily in an entirely different department of the Botkin, and the next day we moved again, to where he actually needed to be.
And it had already become clear on the way that the trip would be a slightly strange one.
On that very night, as we were travelling to Moscow, the train passed through Sasovo.
At the same time Sasovo was struck and the data centres there were blown up.
We were literally passing a place whose name, a few days later, started turning up regularly in a completely different part of my life.
I did not yet know that the names of Russian towns would start appearing in work chats somewhat more often than I would have liked.
Sasovo was still bearable.
Then came Vladimir.
And there it got considerably less amusing.
The main thing happened on 12 October
My father had four shunts replaced.
The operation went well.
As I write this, I am back at the Botkin with him.
This is probably the point at which a normal person could end the article.
Because everything I came to Moscow for went the way it should.
My father is through the operation.
That is the main thing.
The only problem is that the other two weeks somehow went on happening as well.
While I was on leave, data centres were blowing up at work
The name of the company does not matter here.
Something else does.
While I was away, the lads at work were clearing up after a fairly literal destruction of infrastructure.
I tried to join in now and then, but mostly they carried it themselves.
And carried it well.
At some point the recovery stopped being the ordinary procedure along the lines of:
pull the backup → bring the service up → move on
Because the backup can be sitting on a separate server too.
And a separate server, as it unexpectedly turned out, is still located in this same physical world.
Archaeology was required.
Somewhere an old backup copy had survived.
Somewhere the current config was in Git.
Somewhere it had not made it into Git yet, but was sitting locally on someone’s machine.
Somewhere there was a note.
Somewhere somebody simply remembered how the thing had been assembled.
And here something rather interesting happened.
Over the past year we had built a lot of our work so that knowledge would stop living only inside people’s heads.
Configs next to the code.
Notes next to the task.
An investigated incident goes back into the system.
What was originally done partly for the sake of agents — so a model could pick up the context itself and not start every investigation from scratch — suddenly turned out to be a rather good disaster-recovery scheme for humans.
When a server disappears, a file in somebody else’s local folder abruptly stops looking like technical debt.
It looks like a backup.
Not the best one.
But a live one.
And I think this was the first time I saw quite so literally the value of this whole business with external memory.
Not because AI is clever.
But because a human head, one server and one data centre are rather fragile places for the only copy of anything important.
And then OpenAI pressed Published
On 16 October, while I was staying at Lena’s place by Dinamo, Telepath was published in ChatGPT.
Before that it had already been through Anthropic and appeared in the Claude Directory.
I have written separately about the publication in Claude and then the publication in ChatGPT, so there is no point in going over OAuth, MCP, the Telegram Business API and the rest of the machinery again.
What happened afterwards turned out to be far more interesting.
Telepath itself once began with a thoroughly everyday task.
When I arrived in Moscow on 8 October, it was still a fairly small thing.
There were a few dozen accounts.
About fifteen people had actually connected Telegram.
There are now 472 accounts.
221 have Telegram connected.
Over the past twenty-four hours roughly a hundred new registrations have come in.
The message count in the archives is already running into the millions.
It is still a small product.
But it is clearly no longer me, a few acquaintances and people I personally sent a link to.
And the catalogues behave nothing like the way I expected.
Telepath is more visible in Claude.
In ChatGPT the card sits considerably further down its category.
Yet the real new connections come above all from ChatGPT.
So a position in a catalogue and distribution turned out to be two completely different things.
That is probably obvious.
But it is far more entertaining to see it on your own small product.
After publication everything had to be rebuilt again
Publication has an unpleasant property.
People arrive.
Until then any oddity in the product could be explained to oneself roughly like this:
well, it is obvious here
Then a person from another country turns up on Android, opens the wrong tab, Telegram sends them back not quite to the right place, ChatGPT manages to lose the state — and it turns out that nothing is obvious.
In the space of a few days I rebuilt the sign-in.
The main authentication now goes through Telegram directly, with no ritual involving a code in a bot.
I fixed the return back into the assistant.
I reworked the onboarding for different devices.
I went through the people who had got lost somewhere between ChatGPT, the browser and Telegram, and started sending them hints about the exact place where they had fallen off.
I rebuilt the payments.
Plus now costs 399 Stars.
The first active plans have appeared. Four so far.
This is not the story:
we have found product-market fit
This is the story:
oh, somebody actually pressed the button and paid
A useful state as well.
I also, for some reason, built a separate Notes Mini App inside Telegram.
It can hold notes, projects, tasks and cards for people, link pages to each other and search across them.
What matters most to me about it is not the interface.
Its data is shared with the assistant’s tools.
So a conversation can be found in Telegram through ChatGPT, and the thing you want to keep as something other than correspondence can be put into structured memory.
I do not yet know how far this will travel.
But I like the direction.
Telepath is gradually becoming more than a way of giving a model your Telegram.
A place is appearing next to it where something can be carried out of the conversations.
The site had to become less engineering-minded too
I completely rebuilt telepath.lemma.company.
The old version said rather a lot about how everything works inside.
The new one says a much simpler thing:
Your Telegram, inside your AI
That is probably what should have been written there from the start.
A person is not especially interested in how splendid my OAuth 2.1 with PKCE is.
They want to ask:
What did I miss on Telegram today?
And get an answer.
Telepath has also acquired an Instagram — @lemma.telepath.
There is a Telegram channel, @lemma_telepath.
There is a proper setup guide.
Grok and Muse are looking at submissions now too.
After OpenAI and Anthropic I have stopped treating the state of “under review” as an event.
Under review, so under review.
We shall see.
The strangest part was not the catalogue
At some point a man from San Francisco wrote to me.
He is working on a startup around AI customer service and is trying to understand a fairly specific problem: why deploying agents scales badly when the team does a lot of manual work all over again for every new client.
But even that is not the interesting part.
He found me through Codex.
Not through acquaintances.
Not through LinkedIn.
Not because somebody recommended me to somebody.
He asked Codex to find people who had already run into roughly this problem and done something about it.
Codex found my blog.
After that he wrote to me and suggested we talk.
I do not know whether that conversation will lead anywhere at all.
That is not even the point here.
What occupies me more is the mechanism itself.
Somewhere in San Francisco a person states a problem to a model.
The model goes looking for people by the meaning of what they have done.
It finds some Russian blog.
In that blog sit my notes about support, agents and automation.
And some time later a message appears in my Telegram.
SEO, it seems, is gradually getting a little stranger.
It is possible that one of the working promotion strategies now looks like this:
do some specific weird shit and write on the internet, in enough detail, about exactly how you did it.
The robots will sort it out.
Much the same thing happened with people in Moscow
Over two weeks a surprising number of people from completely different parts of my life managed to gather.
With Yegor, a close friend since school, we simply had a good evening.
Saw my cousin Denis.
Met up with Pasha.
Pasha gave me a bottle of Kalashnikov vodka.
After which the evening developed, for a while, strictly in accordance with the name.
I started firing shots.
Then, for some reason, I was defending Pasha from two girls who had come over to meet us.
In the finale he led me into some recreational area of a railway station that ended in a dead end.
He was perfectly fine with that.
So, on the whole, was I.
It also turned out that Vadim lives about fifteen minutes away from me.
Once, in Ulyanovsk, we lived in neighbouring buildings.
And he, my wife and I used to play a card game in the yard that was quite officially called “Shit”.
No metaphors.
Just the name of the game.
It took moving to Moscow for two weeks to work out the geography again.
Met Vladimir.
A very brainy programmer.
Over a few evenings we got quite far into conversations about agents, code, strong models and where human knowledge is supposed to live now.
Amusingly, one of our topics came back round to roughly the same thing the blown-up data centres had just demonstrated:
if an important thing exists only somewhere apart — in Confluence, in a head, in a chat — then for the next person or agent it barely exists at all.
And then I took our correspondence with Vladimir, opened ChatGPT through Telepath and asked the model to work out what we had actually been talking about.
It produced a rather good summary.
So the product I built in order to read Telegram through AI has already started helping me make sense of conversations about how AI ought to be built.
At some point the recursion simply becomes a working process.
There was also a priest
Separately, I met a priest with his own clothing brand.
The idea of the brand is built roughly around the unity of reason, science and religion.
He prays in Hebrew constantly.
He has a wife.
I tried several times, in my head, to compress that description into a single sentence, and realised there is nothing there to compress.
Sometimes a person simply arrives already fully formed as a character.
Bosnia has not disappeared either
Before Moscow I also had a story going with a small side job in Bosnia.
The technical interview with the lead went fine, I think.
On 19 October the person I had been talking to suddenly wrote:
Hi
I replied.
He wrote:
Someone will contact you
I said I would be waiting.
He answered:
Thx
Who exactly will make contact, when and why is unknown.
But somebody.
Some day.
The international career is in good order.
Meanwhile Ulyanovsk carried on happening without me
My family and my daughter, in another city, are in parallel fighting for their rights at the nursery.
Liza has got over salmonella.
The cat, who decided in August to eat a palm tree and nearly died, is also alive.
Quite a season.
Klava has come to Ulyanovsk.
Klava is the type of person for whom any normal description always sounds like a model generating at a high temperature.
A ballerina.
Practises manual therapy.
When people asked her after a day of clients how much she had earned, she might answer in litres of beer.
Plays Morrowind on an old laptop.
I still maintain that a normal life ought to contain more people like that.
Anna the journalist is planning to come too.
Back in 2017 the two of us met Dmitry, who was walking on foot along the Volga.
He even wrote about that day afterwards in his book.
I had been expecting to see some kind of dharma bum.
A child of the road.
A beatnik who chews his punctuation.
What I saw was a very interesting Russian banker who had had enough of everything.
That turned out to be far better.
Dinamo had a soundtrack of its own as well
All these two weeks I was staying at Lena’s.
Lena deserves a separate thank you.
For the hospitality.
For the warmth.
For the chance to simply turn up at a difficult moment, open a laptop and treat her home as a temporary headquarters for a while.
There is one more amusing detail.
The name Lemma was thought up by Lena, once.
A lemma is, to put it in entirely human terms, a small thing from which something else then follows.
A supporting statement on the way to something larger.
For some reason I particularly like exactly that definition at the moment.
A small thing from which something follows.
When I work at home there is usually a child shouting nearby.
Here, in its place, the new school of Russian rap is often playing instead.
The lads are top, by the way.
But listen long enough and a certain kinship between the genres does emerge.
Sometimes you just want to get up and smash everything around you, like in that video.
Then it passes.
You open the laptop.
You fix OAuth.
Tomorrow I leave
It makes for a strange trip.
I came to Moscow with my father for his operation.
On that very night our train went through Sasovo, as it was struck and the data centres blew up.
Then we spent most of a day on paperwork at the Botkin, were temporarily placed in the wrong department, moved the next day, and a few days after that my father had four shunts replaced.
While I was here, the lads at work were pulling systems out of a very physical catastrophe.
Telepath appeared in ChatGPT.
The number of people who have actually connected Telegram grew from about fifteen to more than two hundred.
I rebuilt its sign-in, its payments, its site and half its onboarding.
Built Notes.
Started an Instagram.
Sent off another couple of catalogue submissions.
Some person in San Francisco found me through Codex.
Somebody in Bosnia promised that somebody would contact me.
I saw old friends.
Found new ones.
Discovered that one old friend has been living fifteen minutes away the whole time.
Met a priest with a clothing brand.
Did some shooting with a Kalashnikov.
And all of it somehow fitted between Dinamo and the Botkin.
I would like life to keep moving roughly the way Telepath is moving now.
Not necessarily fast.
Not necessarily to plan.
Without any ceremonial announcement of a new era.
Just a small thing.
Then another one.
Then another.
And after a while you look round and find that something, for some reason, follows from them.
That, I suppose, is a lemma.
Lena came up with a good name once.
But all of that is secondary.
My father is through the operation.
It went well.
That is the main thing I came here for.
Tomorrow I leave.
Unless, of course, this entry gets another addition during the day that is left.
And of course there were far more people than that.
Those who are near now.
Those who are far away.
Those I have not written about here simply because otherwise this entry would turn into a phone book for good.
Not because they matter less.
There are many more people who are in my heart and who are no less valuable to me than the ones I have named.
You just have to stop somewhere.
Peace and love to everyone.