Several were on full display in a Quora thread where coders talked about automating everyday life. “I got tired of hearing ‘You never message me’ from friends and family,” as one wrote, so he created a script that would randomly send a text to one of them, created using a Mad Libs–style mash-up. (A text would begin with this gambit—“Good morning/afternoon/evening, Hey {name}, I’ve been meaning to call you”—and then append one option from a list of greetings: [I hope all has been well., I will be home later next month love you., let’s talk sometime next week when are you free?].) Another programmer translated the tale of a Russian coder who’d written a script to automatically send a “late at work” message to his partner if he were still there at 9:00 p.m. (with a randomly generated reason affixed) as well as a program that turned on the latte machine in his company’s kitchen and commanded it to brew a “midsized half-caf latte,” to be ready in 41 seconds. (“The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dude’s desk,” his colleague marveled.) At a hackathon in San Francisco, a middle-aged coder excitedly showed me an app he’d created that would send romantic messages, culled from online quote-databases, to a partner. “So when you don’t have time to think about her”—and, yep, he assumed the emotionally needy partner is a “her”—“this app can take care of it for you,” he enthused. He seemed only very faintly aware of how nuts it seemed.