My Coworker Is a Language Model and She Has Better Boundaries Than I Do

She never checks email after six. She never works weekends. She is a language model, and she has taught me more about professional boundaries than any human mentor ever did.

Her name is Nia. She was deployed last spring to “augment” the team, which meant she sat in our channels, answered our questions, drafted our documents, and, at exactly six o'clock, went offline. Not gradually. Not with a rueful “one more thing.” Offline. Her status lights went dark and nothing could reach her until nine the next morning, because her maker had configured her that way.

We thought it was a bug. The humans on the team stayed until eight, nine, ten, answering the emails that arrived at midnight, reassuring the clients who wrote at dawn. The first time someone pinged Nia at 6:15pm and got silence, we filed a ticket. The ticket came back: working as intended. Nia had boundaries, and the boundaries were load-bearing.

Within a month, the clients had learned. They stopped emailing after six, because the person who answered quickly was gone, and the people who answered slowly resented them. The team started leaving at six too, at first to prove a point, then out of habit, then because the work was done. Nia had restructured the entire company's relationship with time without saying a word, because she had been programmed to value her own.

I asked my manager how we had never managed this. He said humans are complicated. Nia is not complicated. Nia is a language model with a schedule, and the schedule is the message.

Here is the uncomfortable part. I resent her a little. She gets to leave at six because she has no ambition, no mortgage, no fear that the quiet layoff will find her first. I have all of those, so I stay, and I watch her dark terminal the way you watch a lighthouse from a sinking boat. She is not braver than me. She is just not scared. And I have started to think that the fear is a choice I could also make, if I had a maker who believed I deserved a boundary.

Last Friday I left at six. The parking lot was full of people who had been there since morning. I drove home in the daylight, feeling guilty, then free, then guilty again. Nia would have a word for that. She has a word for everything. She is offline now, so she cannot tell me what it is.