Colophon · On how this book was written

This book was written with Wingworking, a collaborative human-AI practice I have maintained since mid-2025. The name is a generalization of wingcoding — programming with an AI copilot, where the human flies as pilot and the agent as wingman — extended to any discipline of intellectual work: researching, writing, arguing, deciding.

The practice has an explicit division of roles. The human sets the problem, decides the direction, judges the result. The AI agent proposes formulations, expands arguments, searches for and verifies sources, sustains the internal coherence of the body of the work. Neither replaces the other: the agent without the human produces fluent text but no thesis; the human without the agent produces work at the speed of a single brain. Wingworking is what happens when the two agree to produce something neither would reach alone.

The declaration matters for two reasons that deserve recording. The first is one of editorial honesty: a book written this way is neither entirely human nor entirely artificial. The theses are the author’s; the choices of words, the rhetorical structures, the bridges between sections — that is the result of the exchange. Making the method transparent lets the reader calibrate what they are reading. The second is one of methodological traceability: the way books are built is changing as AI models become widespread. Documenting the process — who did what, with which tools, under what discipline — is part of the record that the next generation of authors and editors will need in order to reason about the category now being born.

The AI agent used throughout the production of this volume was Claude (Anthropic), in different configurations according to the phase of the work: Claude Code for editing and reviewing the manuscript’s versions, Claude Desktop and the web app for early exploratory conversations. The intellectual authorship belongs to the undersigned; the technical assistance is acknowledged.

This colophon closes the book as any technical book should close — declaring, without ornament, how it is made.