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
TBD — the feature is live; Dr. Paul hasn’t yet weighed in on whether it holds up.
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. Not yet assessed by Dr. Paul; the Finding and Implication below are placeholders until he has.
Method
Scaffold
Authored the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions pages first, since this feature needed somewhere to point to before it existed.
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
- Authoring the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions pages and adding the new sitewide footer link group
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
- Confirming the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions content and the paired footer grouping
- 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
TBD
The feature is live — try the “Track my path” toggle in the corner of this page. Dr. Paul hasn’t yet given his assessment of whether it holds up as intended; this section will be filled in once he has, not before.
Implication
TBD — pending Dr. Paul’s finding above.
Next Question · 7
Should Dr. Paul become an avatar?
Talking avatar, text chatbot, or shelved entirely?
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