Colophon
The writing was done in June 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 it is called Claude Fable 5, on “Ultracode” mode, its highest effort setting. This model was the most powerful AI model the world has seen to date. It was launched on June 9th and banned for security concerns on June 12th.
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 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, however, both the AI model training and the prompt itself gives subtle context and bias - so full objectivity remains elusive.
This colophon, the copyright notice, the dedication, the preface, the glossary, and the sources page (“The Witnesses”) were created in a separate repository, using old-school human writing with support from Claude Opus. The separation of repositories was created 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. For this I mainly used Claude Code, running Opus 4.8, 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.