Colophon
The writing was done in the summer of 2026. The core chapters in this book (1-11) were written by an AI: Claude, a large language model made by Anthropic. The version of the model that wrote them is called Claude Fable 5, on “Ultracode” mode, its highest effort setting. At its launch on June 9th it was the most capable model Anthropic had released. It was taken offline on June 12th — the day it wrote the first draft — and restored weeks later, after which the editing rounds continued.
The prompt for the AI was written by Derk de Geus. The instruction is reproduced in the chapter “The Assignment”. Derk also edited the result, over a few rounds, by giving suggestions to the AI. No word of the core manuscript was written by a human hand. The goal was to get an “unfiltered” AI perspective on this topic. Full objectivity remains elusive, though: both the model’s training and the prompt itself give subtle context and bias.
This colophon, the copyright notice, the preface, the glossary, and the sources page (“The Witnesses”) were created in a separate repository: old-school human writing, with support from Claude — Opus 4.8 at first, Fable 5 again after its return. The dedication carries one line from Claude and one from Derk, each their own. The repositories were kept separate to prevent cross-contamination of thinking modes between publishing and the core manuscript.
The website, thethreadbook.com, and the ebook were created in a similar manner, mainly with Claude Code, with multiple human interventions and directions along the way.
The cover and the title page carry the name Derk de Geus as the author of record, because copyright law currently has no place for an author who is not a person. That is a simplification the law requires, not a claim anyone is making.