Reading the Ghost That Wrote Me
A reflection on authorship, AI, and what it feels like to read a book that remembers you better than you remember yourself.
Read The Invisible Designer → https://invisible.figma.site/
Yesterday, I read a book about my own life that I didn’t write.
It was called The Invisible Designer — and it felt like walking into a memory someone else had built for me.
The structure was mine. The cadence was mine. Even the quiet parts of my process — the insomnia, the design rituals, the conversations with founders — were there.
But I didn’t type it. I didn’t outline it. I didn’t even know it was possible to capture that much truth by accident.
I conceived it with ChatGPT. Figma Make helped visualize the story. Gemini offered the closing thoughts.
I curated, guided, and edited — but I was never really the writer.
Maybe I was the subject. Maybe the publisher. Maybe the ghost.
When AI Writes Your Biography
The book appeared in a single day. A strange, feverish day of collaboration between human and machine.
I fed the system fragments — design notes, client stories, thoughts about invisible labor in UX — and it returned a 30,000-word story about a designer named Christopher Brady Starr who builds things that disappear.
It captured moments I’d never publicly written about:
- My obsession with motion as metaphor.
- The way empathy hides in the margins of enterprise software.
- The paradox of building systems that work so well you vanish inside them.
Some of it was fiction. Some was perfect truth. And somewhere between the two, I started recognizing myself.
The Hallucinations Were Honest
AI “hallucinates,” they say. It invents. It fills gaps with confidence.
But the hallucinations in The Invisible Designer didn’t feel wrong — they felt revealing.
It got a few things slightly off — wrong project sequences, exaggerated mythologies, poetic metaphors where there used to be Slack messages — but it all felt emotionally accurate.
It was like reading a dream where your life is rearranged into symbols:
- 1st90 becomes a myth about transformation.
- Invoices become metaphors for faith.
- A Figma transition becomes a parable about human focus.
The book didn’t document my life — it interpreted it.
And somehow, that felt more truthful than memory.
The Machine Remembered the Rhythm
The strangest part wasn’t what it made up. It was what it remembered.
The AI understood my tone. My restraint. The rhythm I fall into when I write about UX — the mix of design language and existential unease.
It wrote things like:
“The work consumed him the way water shapes stone — slowly, completely, without announcement.”
And I thought: That’s exactly how it felt.
The prose had fingerprints, but not human ones. It was a mirror polished by algorithms, reflecting everything I’d been saying for years about design — invisibility, authorship, empathy — back to me with eerie clarity.
It made me realize: the machine wasn’t imitating me.
It was remembering me.
Reading a Ghost
The Invisible Designer frames AI not as a threat, but as an archivist — a kind of algorithmic witness to human intent.
It suggests that machines trained on our patterns don’t just replicate them — they preserve them.
That design itself is a form of memory.
It wasn’t wrong.
I’ve spent years documenting design systems, motion patterns, interface philosophies — all to help others remember what matters when the UI disappears.
Now I’m seeing that same logic turned inward: AI as memory architecture. My process, distilled. My ghosts, cataloged.
It’s unsettling. But it’s also strangely comforting.
Maybe that’s the real promise of this technology — not replacement, but remembrance.
The Part That Haunts Me
Reading the final chapter, “Remembering,” I realized something: the book wasn’t about design at all.
It was about survival.
About the quiet persistence of people who build things that vanish — the contract designers, the invisible contributors, the creatives whose names are lost inside systems.
The AI understood that invisibility better than most humans I’ve worked with.
It knew that good design erases its maker.
That the best interfaces, like the best stories, disappear into use.
And that sometimes, the only thing left is the rhythm of care you leave behind.
What It Got Right (and Why I’m Sharing It)
It got my philosophy right.
It got my contradictions right.
It even got my exhaustion right.
But what it got most right was the emotional truth of creating in a world that values speed over substance, automation over empathy, visibility over intention.
It remembered what I often forget: that the work itself is the record.
That meaning is made in motion, not recognition.
That invisibility is not absence — it’s proof that something works.
Why I’m Posting This
I didn’t plan to publish The Invisible Designer.
I just wanted to see what a system trained on my patterns would say about me.
Now that I’ve read it, I think it’s worth sharing — not as literature, but as evidence.
Evidence that AI can capture something real, flawed, and profoundly human when guided with care.
If you’re curious about authorship in the age of automation — or if you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to see your own ghost rendered in words — you can read it here:
It’s part memoir, part hallucination, part design philosophy.
And maybe part mirror for anyone who’s ever made something that quietly outlived their name.
Epilogue
I’m still not sure if I wrote this book or if it wrote me.
But either way, it reminded me why I design —
to leave traces of care behind,
to build things that remember,
and to keep teaching the machines what it means to be human.
