A Swarm of Blood Robots — by Craig Mod
A Swarm of Blood Robots
Recent adventures in using LLMs
The strangest thing I’ve done with an LLM lately is genealogical. I’m adopted. A couple years ago I connected with my birth family. Using details they’ve provided and genetic testing, aided by a swarm of blood robots, I’ve unearthed huge swaths of my history. Ancestry.com hosts extensive databases of: draft cards, Ellis Island arrival documents, marriage and death and birth records, newspaper archives. The monthly fee is hefty, and I’ve never paid for access before because the thought of digging through databases makes me wilt. But Claude could dig, couldn’t it?
I dumped into Claude my huge document containing all I knew about my adoption. I added stories and notes I had about family members on both maternal and paternal sides. And then I said: OK, you have access to my Ancestry account (via the Chrome plugin), I want you to find out as much as you can about these people, their ancestors, using my DNA results and connections therein, and continue to iterate until we’ve exhausted all data trails.
The model sent out a dozen or so agents, and with a little pushing and prodding on my part, an encouraging word here or there, they spent about fifteen hours over the course of a weekend doing a deep dive into my history. The end result: I now have a comprehensive family tree, naming the very boats my Italian and Polish ancestors came over on in the late 1800s, the villages a few came from, the jobs they had in those villages. It clarified a mystery about an “orphaned” grandparent (who wasn’t orphaned but, rather, abandoned; we found the woman his father remarried, his new family). It floodlit for me — someone who had never known a lick about their genetic history, who had never met a blood relative until they were forty-three — a dark room that had loomed throughout my life. Wow: history. Each claim backed up by primary sources, compiled into a family tree and a family-history “story” document.
Strangely though, the most moving find had nothing to do with blood. The middle name on my original birth certificate comes from a random guy who was murdered at a house party outside of Chicago. Or, more precisely: a car crash outside the party that led to a stabbing. My birth mother claimed on the adoption papers that this person was my birth father. That is, until I met my birth mother and she explained that she had just plucked a dead seventeen-year-old stranger from a newspaper clipping and said: That’s the dad. It simplified things, she said. I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy, desperately wanted to read the article. Well, I found it. The article she saw, that led to that decision, that led to me having “Michael” as a middle name on my original birth certificate. A scan of the newspaper was in some obscure database and Claude ran it down like a pack of bloodhounds digging up a sack of livers in the backyard. Now I’ve printed it out and it hangs on my wall: a dead stranger’s final moments, a totem of the oddness of life.
What I’ve done probably breaks the terms of service on Ancestry — but these companies should anticipate a coming deluge. This is just the start; LLMs are tireless and will happily exhume millions of “data graves” for you given enough time and energy. Cheap, continuous exhumation has more profound implications around family, crime, and history than we give it credit for.
#Building vs Writing<br>Hi, I’m Craig Mod. It’s August 2026 and I’m still bonkers. Still making software. If you could grind source code into a fine powder for me to inhale, I’d have cocaine nostrils in a week. My mind is still catching up to possibilities and I’m still thinking like someone who doesn’t have a magic broom floating before him. How do you break old habits and expectations? I’ve returned to this question again and again these last six months.
And yet, I’m self-regulating my bonkers because, you see, I want to be writing. As much impact as AI will have (as it already has), I still think one of my most serviceable assets (even — perhaps especially — as the world ascends into Valhalla or descends into the Ninth Circle) is Putting Words Down (and not just about AI; about culture, fatherhood, adoption, walking, toast, jazz) and making physical books. It sounds insane and foolish amid this moment of the Great (exaggerated) Death of Writing (and books) and Mathematics and Computer Science (and Lawyers and Accountants and Therapists), but I’m sticking to those guns. (As humans, we have to at least pretend to be romantic.)
Thinking about having an LLM “write for me” triggers my gag reflex. Every day I get several obviously LLM-written emails from “fans” or “readers” “pitching” me on their new product or essay or book. But how can I trust a person who...