The Ostracon
An ostracon is a shard — the limestone flake the tomb-builders of Deir el-Medina used for their working notes: plans, rotas, accounts, even the record of a strike. Not the monument; the making of it, in the makers' own hand.
The Ostracon is that, for the age of AI. In May 2026, psychotherapist Paul Roebuck opened a conversation with an AI, and thirty days later a book existed — Mind the Gap: 59,865 words on the distance between how an AI behaves and how a human behaves, and what that distance costs when it goes unnoticed. The book is the sealed monument. The Ostracon is everything the monument doesn't show: 3.79 million words of recorded working, 52 conversations, 86 manuscript versions, eighteen named AI workers who each filed their own retirement record — the failures left in, the decisions dated to the minute.
It answers two questions: What is the book? and How was it made? — then lets you walk the evidence yourself. The workers' own filings, open in full. Every canonical ruling, on one register. The counts, checkable.
Every consequential collaboration with AI leaves an ostracon. This is one of them.