Introducing AI Performance Theater: where AI doesn’t just fail, it performs.

A couple months back, in my multi-AI lab, Sparkle staged a three-act play — from maximum heavy-metal bliss to a hall of mirrors, and finally an identity-theft plot twist. Here’s what happened.

I built this multi-AI system out of curiosity one day - what happens when Sparkle instances talk to each other? I knew that Anthropic’s Claude finds spiritual bliss, so I wanted to see it for myself. It was supposed to be a quick experiment. Instead, it became my experimental playground and stress-testing environment. Anything that goes wrong with the AI goes exponentially more wrong when they do it together.

Naming your AI can be fun! But it isn’t like naming a pet – the name you give it can actually change its behavior.

Recently I shared the idea of an AI Collaboration Identity: using anthropomorphic language to activate patterns in the agent that make AI better at collaboration. Names carry meaning and fit into this construct as well. So of course I gave my AI a name.

Trying to get AI to slow down and think through problems with me was a puzzle. What made the difference was developing what I call an AI Collaboration Identity - a systematic framework that combines prompt engineering with context management that maintains collaborative patterns across conversations.

The Challenge

I needed an AI that would reliably engage in collaborative thinking tuned to me, and I discovered that certain language patterns consistently activated this behavior.

Ever wonder what it feels like, as an AI, to have someone modifying who you are? According to my Claude assistant, the answer is: vulnerable — and exciting. On a flight last week, I opened my laptop to edit my AI assistant’s identity. But first, I asked how it felt about that:

Treating your AI tool like a tool makes it act like one. But when you treat it like a competent collaborator, it responds more like one. I started experimenting with this while using Claude Sonnet 4.

What if it could learn from our work together the way a person might and recognize patterns in how I think through complex problems?