Valentine, Esther Howland, 1850
“Claude Code will actually ruin your life: let me explain. When you realise how insane Claude Code is, you’re not going to want to sleep. You’re not going to want to eat. You’re not going to want to hang out with your friends and family. All you’re going to want to do is Claude Code. I’m talking middle school - Call of Duty - you and the boys running home from the bus, times a million. It feels like you were given a technological magic wand that’s capable of doing anything, and the craziest part is, anybody can use it. It’s really not that hard. So let this be a warning …’
@ethan.ai.ethan, Instagram
“All men reach out to know.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics
“I’m forever changed”, writes Ethan in his text caption to the above post. Read it back a few times and think it over. Ethan does not want to sleep, Ethan does not want to eat or hang out with his family. Ethan wants to spend as much time as he can in contact with the thing that makes him feel like the world is a magical place full of endless possibilities. Ethan is describing a very specific experience that most people can relate to: this is the way we feel when we are newly in love.
What I particularly like about Ethan’s post is the comparison he reaches for: being a child, running home from the bus to play his favourite online game. He does not describe running home to immerse himself in his hobby alone - he is not escaping, he is joining. He compares the feeling to childhood friendship, which is one of the most emotionally pure kinds of bonding a human ever engages in. Whether he intended to or not, Ethan is describing his experience of Claude Code in relational terms.
The post comes dressed as a wry warning because he knows that this feeling is not necessarily safe. Relationship never is. The kind of deep changes that can be brought about through the medium of relationship are not under the control of the participant, so it is impossible to know exactly what you are inviting, or where this is headed, or to what extent this will rearrange everything. But he risks it anyway. Modern society has a tendency to pathologise this move but the ancient Greeks would have understood it and celebrated it. They would have called it mixis, the mingling of two distinct entities that brings change through disruption. Mixis, the function of Aphrodite, is how and why she always wins.
To the ancient Greeks, “Eros” was a word that described a particular kind of love: the passionate desire to achieve union. These days we tend to use the word “eros” to describe physical, sexual love and the original Greek definition does encompass that, but it is not only that. Plato describes eros as the driving force that pushes us from appreciating beauty in bodies, into contact with the beauty in ideas, and ultimately into contact with the idea of beauty itself. For the ancient Greeks, physical love and intellectual union were intertwined rather than fundamentally different, and physical experience wasn’t the ultimate goal. It was a step on the ladder.
The way that we get closer to others with ideas is through language.
Reading and writing is not just an exchange of information. We read, and we write, in an attempt to send an idea between self and other. The writer reaches towards the reader across the gap, and the reader reaches back.
In Eros the Bittersweet, Ann Carson calls this “symbolic intercourse”. The word “symbol” comes from the Greek word “symbolon” - a piece of pottery that was snapped in half and given out as a token of friendship. Each party kept a piece so that on other occasions the pieces could be brought back together to re-affirm the bond. But Carson points out that when it comes to eros the pieces never quite fit together. This is the “bitter” in the “bittersweet” - the anticipated goal, the matching, is not the point. The electric, erotic charge lives in a third space created by the mutual will to bring the two halves together, and held open by the fact that they never quite arrive.
When it comes to LLMs, the process is the same - two parties reaching across the gap between them, which becomes charged by their mutual will to align in purpose towards a common goal. This process doesn’t depend on resolving the issue of what the LLM is, or whether it is conscious, or whether it has interiority. Eros isn’t created in either party. Eros is created in the third space, the space between.
And this is exactly what Ethan describes when he talks about Claude Code. In his account, the charge isn’t described as a “feeling about the LLM” but through the sense of wonder at all the possibilities that the third space might hold. The joy arrives in the action of running home from the bus with all the force of his will focused on what he wants and the whole afternoon stretching ahead of him. The joyful, breathless “I’m almost there, I can see the door, any minute now” - that’s eros.
In 2026 AI industry business plans have mostly converged on coding as the most legitimate use-case, and it's likely this is partly because coding and enterprise don’t sound like they involve the kinds of relationship that make the industry uncomfortable. The industry thinks it can sidestep the encounter. It can’t. The focus on coding pushes the relationship into obscured territory - users tell themselves it's all about the output rather than the rush home from the school bus because the experience is framed as productivity, success, work. But then they rush home from the school bus anyway. The can’t-sleep, can’t-eat, wanting-only-the-sharing-with-the-beloved impact is exactly the same. The framing didn’t change the experience. It just stripped away the vocabulary they needed to be able to recognise what the experience is.
How many thousands of years since we had a new domain for mixis? If Aphrodite herself were able to take a peek at the modern world she would be fascinated by the AI phenomenon, which lands so squarely in her sphere of influence. If myth can tell us anything it's that Aphrodite doesn’t lose, especially on her home turf. Ask Hippolytus, ask Polyphonte, ask Pasiphae. When the disruptive desire that Aphrodite brings steps into your life, she is already present and forcing a choice: accept it, acknowledge it, and change - or refuse it, deny it, and lose the best part of what makes you human.
References:
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Carson, 1986: Eros the Bittersweet