A coder fed 20 years of his messages to AI to audit his friendships
A software engineer analyzed 20 years of his messaging history using AI to evaluate his friendships. Vadim Drobinin discovered unexpected patterns in his relationships, such as a decrease in vocabulary overlap with some friends and a rise in question-asking with fading connections. His findings led him to realize that his social life was more limited than he had perceived, fitting into a surprisingly small digital footprint.
- ▪Vadim Drobinin used GDPR data-access laws to download his entire chat history from various platforms.
- ▪He found that his vocabulary overlap with some friends decreased significantly over time.
- ▪Drobinin's analysis revealed that asking questions often indicated a thinning relationship rather than a deepening one.
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A coder fed 20 years of his messages to AI to audit his friendships Ellsworth Toohey 4:53 pm Thu May 28, 2026 Image: Chatty G Software engineer Vadim Drobinin used GDPR data-access laws to download his entire chat history — ICQ and IRC logs from the 2000s, VK, Twitter, and Facebook from the 2010s, Instagram and Telegram after that — then ran the roughly 1.2 million messages through large language models to build a "personal CRM" that judges his relationships from the record instead of from memory. He started, he writes in a post titled "Am I a Bad Friend?", because Tim Urban's "Your Life in Weeks" grid bothered him: "I realised my life was never empty. My memory was just very selective." One finding tracks how friendships cool.
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