Working With Anitta
Collaboration asks us to speak the work out loud
This is the third essay in the Anitta Series, where I begin exploring AI as a thinking partner.
These pieces trace my ongoing relationship with AI as a thinking partner.
They move from first contact, to working agreement, to the quieter ways collaboration reshapes how I write, reason, and show up.
Each post stands alone. Together, they tell a longer story.
I didn’t write this essay right away. Nothing dramatic broke or failed. I was excited to work with Anitta. I expected the familiar kind of friction that sharpens intention.
Instead, I kept stopping.
I lost the thread. I forgot what I was doing. The work didn’t fail, exactly. It stalled.
I trust my ability to do analysis. The work usually feels safe. I know how to look at data, notice patterns, adjust direction, and keep moving. That quiet confidence slipped.
The flow broke almost immediately. Errors surfaced. I couldn’t remember steps without effort. Progress slowed. Learning felt unmoored. That surprised me.
With Wiggins and Quinn, work carries momentum. It flows. My body relaxes. I don’t think about progress. With Anitta, the absence of ease was loud.
I tried again. I slowed down. The errors stayed the same. Irritation built without insight. I walked away. Not as a strategy, frustration.
I tried a sideways move. A different model, pointed at the same data. I expected relief. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t lost, but I wasn’t grounded either. The problem hadn’t moved.
I lowered the stakes. I pulled a small, personal dataset. Credit card charges. No pressure. No cost to being wrong. Analysis felt safer there. It didn’t go well, but it taught me something.
It stopped being about Anitta.
When intention met reality, what surfaced wasn’t a tooling problem.
It was the cost of collaborating in a different way.
Working with Anitta required me to slow down and speak the work out loud, to explain thinking I usually carry silently. Nothing was broken. But the shape of the collaboration changed what the work asked of me.