Being a software engineer doesn’t mean I know nothing about modern neuropsychology. I have read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and all six books in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Also, I know how to write code in C++. In my own understanding, I am kind of an expert.

So when I tell you there is a toaster in your head, please don’t look at me like I’m a lunatic. I mean, I am crazy – one needs to be to run this site. But this is something different.

Because by toaster I don’t mean a metal box used to turn a slice of bread into a manifestation of breakfast happiness. There is nothing but a caffeine- and sugar-hungry jelly thing inside your skull. No doubt about it. What I want to write about is the concept of a toaster applied to your brain.

Bread in. Toast out.

Context + prompt in. Output out.

Day of coding + hard bug in. Solution idea out.

It’s waiting for you in the morning like warm toast with butter. Or it hits you during your daily run. Or in the shower.

“Duh… everyone knows how it works. So why write about it?”

Because primo: I am kind of crazy. And secondo: AI changes the rules of the game.

And we focus only on the latter.

The toasters arrived, and with them, creating images, animations, games and websites became easier than ever.

And we will not dive into boring theory – we jump straight into practice.

Test subject: Me monkey

Precondition: Me monkey was doing something people call reflective thinking: keeping a journal of everyday thoughts, focused on things he was interested in. He wrote questions, he wrote answers, he read the questions back and re-evaluated the answers. Me monkey saw patterns in his own thinking and, more importantly, he was creating context around which his brain could circulate, producing interesting ideas (usually in the middle of the night). The journal, however, had one downside: it was boring.

Stimulus: Me monkey was given a toaster.

First result: Me monkey hit the toaster with his head. More times than expected.

Second result: Me monkey started using the toaster to produce artifacts. He used the toaster to create a place to store the artifacts. He stored the artifacts inside the storage.

He divided the work between the toasters and himself: Claude for creating the website and organizing data. ChatGPT for pictures, evaluation, and indexing — dressed up as a war engine. Monkey brain for writing. And thinking.

Me monkey thought he was writing poetry. What he was really creating was his first post-AI digital garden: a place where he could gather ideas and put them into the soil. Watch them grow, pull the weeds, and keep the context ready for the inner toaster, so it could wake him up in the middle of the night with unexpected solutions.

Conclusion: Me monkey bad at poetry. Digital garden good at solving problems. Not boring.

And the question this garden tried to solve was not a trivial one. It has troubled my mind since I first learned that black holes exist: what happens beyond the event horizon?

My garden came up with an answer.

Not the one I expected, and not one that will win a Nobel Prize in physics.

But one that lets me sleep well, despite knowing that, in some sense, each of us crosses an event horizon of our own at the end of our life.