The Art of Absurd Commitment

There’s a scene in The Naked Gun where Frank Drebin stumbles through a hospital, unknowingly disconnecting a patient’s oxygen to plug in a popcorn maker. What makes it work isn’t just the gag. It’s the surgical precision behind the chaos. Every pratfall was storyboarded. Every prop was measured. The joke only lands because its creators treated lunacy like a science.

Recently, I discovered the software equivalent: MS Paint IDE. For the uninitiated, this is a fully functional Java compiler that interprets image files made in Microsoft Paint as code. Syntax highlighting is supported, undeclared throw errors, and the compiler produces working code. I didn’t get the joke at first. I spent 30 minutes reading the documentation before it clicked: Why would anyone write code in MS Paint?

What stunned me wasn’t just the concept. It's that it took more than two years of work to get it to this state.

Suddenly, Leslie Nielsen’s ghost was whispering in my ear: True absurdity requires straight-faced dedication.

My own little joke

A few years ago, I made a little internal page at a company for April fools day. It was called Proxy Ai. It read:

It reads your emails so you don't have to. It reads every posts on social media so you don't FOMO. It communicates with those chatty colleagues so you don't have to. Proxy Ai... So you don't have to.

This was maybe an hour of work with graphics swipped from Google search. I added charts going up, showing increased productivity. It was lighthearted and given the date of April fools, I assumed everyone would get it.

I got a few messages from people getting the joke, since we were an AI company after all. But then to my horror I got these messages:

Any way I can get the link to the repo? Didn't know we were working on this.

And another said:

Can we get a demo?

And finally:

That actually sounds like a pretty good product. Does it send you a summary of the conversations, emails and social media posts?

To which I answered: "No!"

I updated the website with these messages as testimonials on the bottom of the page.

Taking the joke seriously

What began as a joke was starting to feel like a challenge. Then I stumbled on a quote from the creator of MS Paint IDE...

The IDE may seem like a joke, but the research and development gone into it is most definitely not.

Proxy Ai is a joke, but I have decided to spend some time and resources on it. What began as landing page with Comic Sans text is now getproxyai.com. So why build it? For the same reason someone compiles Java with fingerpainted flowcharts.

In the spirit of Frank Drebin, Proxy AI launches today (beta). It won’t read your emails. It certainly won’t make you productive. Instead, it will replace you entirely. Sign up now—before it decides it doesn’t need you either.

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