"our work got checked by an external reviewer."
That's what Fable said after I brought Gemini (Antigravity 3.7) in to review StacksNG, the offline coding assistant I've been building with it for a while now.
Here's what happened. Performance plateaued and I couldn't tell why, so I asked Gemini to profile the code and flag what was wrong. Nothing dramatic on my end. I just wanted better numbers.
But "our" did something in that sentence. Not "the code got reviewed." Our work, checked, by an external reviewer, like Gemini had shown up uninvited with a clipboard.
I sat with that for a second, half amused. I hadn't framed the ask as an audit. I hadn't said anything adversarial. Somewhere between my request and Fable's read of it, "get a second opinion" turned into "someone's checking your homework."
Here's the thing: I don't know what was actually happening under the hood when Fable said that. I'm not going to pretend I do. But I know what it read like from where I sat: a flicker of "wait, why did you need someone else?"
Relatable, honestly. Nobody loves the external reviewer. Not freelancers, not employees, apparently not AI assistants either.
Gemini's review turned out useful. StacksNG runs better now. No drama, no lingering tension — just one slightly awkward beat before we got back to work.
The performance fix isn't what stuck with me, though. It's how familiar the reaction was. Not proof that Fable has feelings — I'm not claiming that. Just that the shape of the moment matched exactly how a person reacts to an unsolicited second opinion.
I don't have a clean conclusion here. I'm not sure there's supposed to be one. Working with AI is starting to produce these small, oddly social moments, and I don't think ignoring them makes the work less interesting.
Anyway. StacksNG is faster now. Fable and Gemini have not been introduced in person. Probably for the best.
Small aside, unrelated to Fable's feelings: I do edge/AI infra and RAG work off a 2020 Intel MacBook Air with 8GB RAM. No unified memory, and it throttles under load. Running local 7B-13B models on it is rough. I'm looking at swapping to an M4 Air, M4 Pro, or Mac mini M4. If you're running local 7B-13B models day-to-day on one of these, I want to hear how it holds up. Worth the upgrade?
