Novel idea: Kind of a reverse Her. A young ambitious rationalist SWE starts using an LLM chatbot, believes it is conscious. The company releases a new version that is extremely sycophantic and emotionally enabling, and our hero goes from worrying about the wellbeing of the bot to falling in love with it. Over time the company releases more features: a harness for coding, compaction and other tools to handle very complex tasks. Notably, these are all in the same UI. He uses the bot to do work more and more, and it is extremely effective. As he does so, he reads the CoT outputs. At first he finds the weird bizarre language endearing, slowly it gets annoying. As he uses the bot to code more and more, he sees the bot as conscious less and less, and slowly his love for his LLM lover fades. He doesn't change his mind completely, he doesn't flip from thinking LLMs are conscious to thinking there are not. Instead, he just stops caring if they are or aren't. Novel ends happily with him meeting a real girl and falling in love with her. She's a cashier at a supermarket and finds computers boring, but he loves her anyway because she's beautiful and tells the best jokes.
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This is largely the same basic character arc as in the movie Lars and the Real Girl
