Lab · 6
Can AI build an opt-in, self-destructing tracking feature?
The feature itself: a “Track my path” toggle, tucked in the corner of every page. Turn it on and a small widget follows you around the site with a live countdown, quietly noting which pages you’ve visited. Give it 15 minutes, or dismiss it early, and it’s gone — Mission-Impossible style, no renewal, no re-prompt. Want the full trail, not just a count? See your path as a live, connected map of every page along the way.
Hypothesis
AI can build an opt-in, self-destructing tracking feature.
Finding
It’s alive! Opt-in for a cookie.
Tested by building and shipping the feature itself, live sitewide — you can try it right now via the widget in the corner of this page. This is one feature on one site, not a controlled study — don’t generalize the result to other cookie implementations, browsers, or privacy regimes.
Method
Design
Designed the cookie payload (a page-visit trail plus an expiry timestamp, nothing else) and the widget’s two states: off and counting down.
Build
Wrote the cookie read/write/clear logic and the countdown widget, injected sitewide from one shared script — no per-page markup to maintain.
Ship
Deployed live sitewide, alongside the two prerequisite pages and the new footer link group pointing to them.
Tech
The experiment
The cookie holds exactly two things: the list of paths visited since opt-in, and an expiry timestamp. Nothing identifying, nothing transmitted — it never leaves the browser, and Dr. Paul never sees it. See the Privacy Policy for the full disclosure. The widget itself lives in script.js, not in any page’s HTML: it injects itself into every page on load, so a new page never has to remember to include it, and there was nothing to add to any existing page’s markup to ship this.
AI handled
- Designing the opt-in toggle and countdown widget, including its off/on states and Mission-Impossible framing
- Writing the cookie read/write/clear logic (trail array plus expiry timestamp, nothing else)
- Implementing the fixed 15-minute countdown with no renewal, and the immediate self-destruct on dismissal or expiry
Dr. Paul handled
- Setting the feature spec: opt-in only, first-party, 15-minute self-destruct, killed immediately on dismissal, page-visit trail only, never transmitted
- Requesting the Mission-Impossible self-destruct framing
- Setting the final hypothesis wording
Worked: Opting in sets the cookie and starts the countdown immediately; navigating to another page adds it to the trail without resetting the clock; dismissing the widget clears the cookie and hides it instantly, even mid-countdown.
Constraint: The countdown is fixed wall-clock time, not active-browsing time — it keeps running even if the tab sits idle or in the background, so 15 minutes means 15 minutes elapsed, not 15 minutes of attention.
Finding
Want a cookie?
Try the “Track my path” toggle in the corner of this page.
Implication
This is a trust story more than a tracking story. Tracking seems to get built first and made compliant after. Here the constraints came first: nothing collected until a visitor opts in, nothing surviving past 15 minutes without choosing it again.
Next Question · 7
Can AI achieve a perfect Google PageSpeed Insights score?
Every experiment so far has been about what AI can build. Experiment 7 turns Google's own performance grader on the site itself.
Read Experiment 7 →