So You Want to Be a LARPer

every few days someone asks me how to get good at something. hacking, coding, writing, whatever. i wrote a whole earnest post about the hacking one. long, sincere, meant every word of it.

but there's a rarer soul out there, and honestly a smarter one, market-wise. this person doesn't want to get good at the thing. that's hard, it takes years, and your enthusiasm dies somewhere around month four. no. this person wants something purer: they want to look good at the thing. and here's the upgrade, it doesn't have to be one thing. it can be anything. a different thing every week if you want it that way.

they want to be a larper. not a hacker-larper or a founder-larper specifically. just a larper. general-purpose. an artist of the surface.

and for the first time in history, the tooling is actually there for it. the thing about 2026 is the costume got abstracted. used to be you had to pick a guy to be and build his whole kit by hand: the hacker needed a hoodie and a terminal, the writer needed a moleskine and a haunted look, the founder needed a vest and a problem. now there's one costume that fits all of them, and it's a chat window. describe the artifact of the identity you want this week and it hands you the artifacts of competence, and you wear the whole thing like a coat you didn't sew.

this is the guide for that one. wrote it around 4am with 200 tabs open, one of which is doing my actual thinking for me. anyway, let's go :3

real talk first.

most larping advice is outdated because it assumes you commit to a single fake identity and defend it forever. that's the old larp, the artisanal one, where you had to memorise vocabulary and hold a consistent bit. exhausting. genuinely high-skill, if you think about it too hard. barely better than just learning the thing.

the modern larp isn't that, not even a little. you don't need to be a fake anything anymore. you need one subscription and the willingness to hit paste. the machine is the competence part. you're just the guy holding it, taking the photo, saying "yeah i built this."

and here's the part that makes it the golden age: the output is often genuinely fine. it's not the old larp where you bluffed and hoped nobody checked. now when someone checks, there's a real working thing sitting there. it just isn't yours in any sense that survives a follow-up question. follow-up questions are rare, though, and the working thing is right there in front of everyone, so statistically you're safe. probably. we'll get to the probably.

how i accidentally became a larper.

i didn't decide to become one. there was no moment, nobody sat me down. i just kept shipping things i couldn't explain, and one day looked up and had a github green square for every day of the month and couldn't tell you what a single commit did.

it started with a prompt, embarrassingly. i needed a script, asked the machine, it wrote the script, the script worked. something broke right there, some wall between "i can do this" and "this got done somewhere near me," because from the outside those two things look exactly the same, and the internet only ever sees the outside.

next day i "wrote" a landing page. day after, i "fixed" a bug in a language i've never touched. by the end of the week i'd "built" a full app, understood approximately none of it, and my commit history looked like the best month of somebody's career. it was not the best month of my career. i was pasting. but the shape of it, the green squares, the "just shipped 🚀", the shape was flawless.

that's really the whole origin story. pasting. wanting to seem like a thing, so asking the machine to produce what that thing produces, then putting my name on top, which is the one part the machine can't do for you and also the only part i actually contributed.

but notice what happened there. i didn't learn a language. i didn't understand the bug. i typed a sentence in english, a competent-looking artifact fell out, and i took a screenshot. the "skill" was a habit of pasting with confidence, built over a couple months of never once reading what came out.

that muscle is the whole modern game. everything below is just how to train it across as many identities as you want without accidentally getting good at any of them.

the one tool that replaced every costume.

everyone says you need to "learn to use AI." bad framing for us, because learn is doing damage sitting right there in the sentence. you don't learn to use it. you aim it.

the whole trick of the general-purpose larp is that the agent covers breadth and depth both, and you supply the one thing it can't: the vibe of ownership. it writes the code, you say "clean." it drafts the essay, you post it with "wrote this in one sitting lol." it does the recon, you paste the summary in the channel and add "target's a mess." it makes the design, you say "iterated on this a while." that word, iterated, does so much work for so little cost. it implies a process. there was no process. there was one prompt and a screenshot.

here's the sacred workflow, and it's the same no matter which identity you're wearing that week. one: prompt, describe the artifact of the identity you're cosplaying. two: paste, move the output somewhere with your name on it, and do not read it, because reading is the one habit that ends the larp, since reading leads to understanding and understanding leads to actually being able to do the thing, which is the outcome everyone here is trying to avoid. three: post, ship the shape, whatever that identity's version of a green square or a tweet or a PR is. four: say "clean", the one-word review, deploy over anything, it signals you looked. you did not look.

notice the division of labour again. the machine does everything. you do the posting and the pronoun. it made the thing, you said "i." that "i" is the entire value you're adding, and honestly it isn't much, but it photographs beautifully.

pick a guy to be this week.

the old larp made you commit to one identity. the new one's a wardrobe, rotate as you like. a starter set, roughly ordered by how little anyone actually checks:

the 10x engineer, the flagship larp. the agent writes it, you commit it, your graph turns into a wall of green. when the code breaks in a way the agent didn't foresee, you go quiet and re-prompt until it stops breaking, and to the timeline this reads as debugging. it isn't. you and the machine are just taking turns guessing. but the graph. the graph is a masterpiece.

the hacker: covered elsewhere in more depth, so short version: point the agent at a target, screenshot the report, never write the writeup, because the writeup is a confession under oath. "eh, standard stuff."

the founder: the agent writes the deck, the one-pager, the vision, the cold emails, the whole worldview. you supply a vest and a problem you heard about once. "we're building the future of X," where X is whatever the model suggested when you asked it what's hot right now.

the writer: the agent drafts, you post "spent all night on this." the tell is you can't discuss your own prose in any depth, because your relationship to it is closer to a courier's relationship to a parcel. keep the interviews short.

the researcher: the agent summarises papers you'll never open, and you drop the summaries with a thoughtful "interesting implications here." there are no implications you're aware of. "interesting" is a container you're shipping empty.

the polyglot, the designer, the analyst, whatever, same move, different noun. the real discovery of the modern larp is that the method never changes. prompt, paste, post, "clean," all the way down, and the only thing that shifts is which identity you're renting that afternoon. you can be a different guy every day of the week if you want (monday engineer, tuesday founder, wednesday crypto takes, thursday photographer, friday you suddenly have opinions on foreign policy) and none of it connects to a self, because there isn't one doing the work. there's a machine doing the work and a self pointing at it, and pointing travels well across every domain there is.

sounding the part.

you can't larp what you can't say out loud, but please, do not learn what the words mean. that's the genius of the modern vocabulary: it's domain-agnostic. these work whether you're pretending to be a security researcher, a novelist, or a machine learning engineer. "it depends": the universal load-bearing beam, works on any question in any field, squint, exhale, say it, let them fill the silence. they always do. "i'd have to look at it properly": commits you to nothing, across all of human knowledge. the code, the manuscript, the dataset, the contract, you'd have to look at it properly and you never will. "that's kind of trivial though": makes hard things sound beneath you in any discipline you like. "yeah i've messed with that": the great universal claim, tool or technique or language or author or ideology, you have not messed with it, but "messed with" is a fog thick enough to hide mastery or a glance at the logo. "we iterated a lot on this": the we is you and the machine, the iterated is you re-prompting, and it sounds like craft when it was actually a conversation with a robot that you're now taking full credit for. flawless, honestly.

the relatable version: a modern larp is a set of confident, domain-neutral nouns riding on top of a machine's output, and credibility comes down to whether anyone in the room can be bothered to ask a second question.

the mega dump.

in the old days this section would run forty links deep per identity, hacking tools, writing craft, design theory, the works. i held that kind of thing back in my real posts because people hoard resources instead of doing anything with them.

for the general-purpose larper the dump is almost insultingly short, and that's kind of the point. one good AI subscription is the universal costume: replaces the hoodie, the moleskine, the vest, the terminal, and honestly the years. the word "iterated" is your entire craft, in a single verb, applicable to every field there is. a github with a full green graph is proof of a work ethic you're renting by the token. "clean" or "shipped" or "wrote this in one sitting" covers the review, the announcement, and the humblebrag, rotate as needed. a bio with three unrelated identities in it (engineer, writer, founder), the slashes imply range, the range is a subscription. and the willingness to not read the output is, honestly, the single most important skill on this list, because the whole thing falls apart the moment you get curious about what the machine actually did.

that's it. that's the dump. used to take a lifetime to fake one identity, now it takes a monthly plan to fake all of them, and if you sit with that for more than a second it gets a little bleak, so don't. next section :3

things nobody tells you.

here's the part the influencers skip, because it isn't aesthetic and it doesn't get engagement. but it decides whether the larp survives, and surviving is the whole game.

the boss fight is always the same: someone takes the machine away and says "show me." whiteboard, no internet. "walk me through your own code." "edit this paragraph live." "explain your own thesis." this is where every general-purpose larp goes to die, and it comes for every identity equally, which is the cruel part: the more guys you're being, the more boss fights you're exposed to. master the exits: "not without my setup," "i think better async," "i'd want to sit with it." the very best move is to seem too senior to demonstrate on demand, like a chef who won't cook at the party.

you'll start to forget which things you can actually do. this one's real, and it sneaks up on you. after enough months of prompt-paste-post, the line between "i did this" and "this happened somewhere near me" genuinely blurs in your own head, and eventually you walk into a room believing your own graph. that's the dangerous kind of larper, not the cynical one, the one who fell for it. protect one honest corner of your brain that still knows the difference, or the larp stops being a choice and turns into a memory problem.

comparison hits weird now. you'll meet someone who used the exact same tools you did and somehow understands their own output, who read it, can change it, can explain why the machine did what it did. same subscription, opposite outcome. that person isn't a larper, they used the machine like a bicycle, and you used it like a wheelchair you don't medically need. the discomfort you feel looking at them is your own capacity, waving at you from across a room you chose not to walk into.

and it's more work than the work, eventually. this is the punchline of every larp, and it's especially true of the general-purpose one. keeping up fluency-cosplay across five identities, dodging boss fights, never once getting caught curious, costs more energy long-term than just getting good at one thing would have. people spend years defending a facade they could've spent becoming the actual thing, and the facade doesn't even feel good. it feels like being about to get caught, all the time, in five fields at once.

there is no roadmap.

so after all that (the one costume, the rotating identities, the prompt-paste-post-"clean," the boss fights), here's where i actually land, and it's the same place the hacker post landed, just walked in from the other door.

there is no roadmap. for the larper there's no roadmap because there's nowhere you're going. there's a prompt box, and a screenshot, and a very good bio, and a self that points at things and says "i." it works, from a distance, in the dark, for a while.

but here's the thing hiding under the whole joke like white text on white background: the machine is the best gift a curious person ever got, and the most seductive trap an incurious one ever walked into, and it's the exact same tool in both hands. the difference isn't the subscription, everyone's got the subscription. the difference is whether, after the thing gets made, you get curious about how it got made: whether you read the output, ask the follow-up, let the artifact teach you the skill it just demonstrated.

do that and the machine turns you into someone who can actually do the thing, faster than anyone in history ever could. skip it and the same machine turns you into someone with a flawless graph and a growing terror of whiteboards.

the door to actually being the thing was never locked, and it's cheaper now than it's ever been. you can be a real engineer, writer, hacker, whatever, using the exact tools you're using right now to fake it. the only edit is reading what falls out and staying curious past the screenshot.

or don't. keep pointing, keep pasting, keep being five guys who are secretly no guys. it's warm in the prompt box, the output looks great, and from a distance nobody can tell.

but you can. that's the part nobody tells you either.

note: the original draft of this post was, ironically, pointed-at rather than written. i asked, it produced, i said "clean," and then, here's the twist, i actually read it, which is the one move that ends the larp. and now here we both are. hehe. <3

— arsh