Black Mirror had an episode where a grieving partner rebuilt a lost loved one as an AI — trained on messages, emails, tone of voice.
We watched it as fiction.
A tool called Colleague Skill just made the workplace version real. Feed it someone’s chat logs and emails, and it produces an AI that replicates both their technical patterns and communication style. 8,400 GitHub stars in a week.
The China context matters, but it’s a symptom. The concept is older and broader: Digital Twins, applied to people. Until now that framing lived in research papers and HR thought-leadership decks. Now it’s a GitHub repo with an install guide: titanwings/colleague-skill.
The questions this opens are genuinely interesting — and not all of them are bad:
- Could your expertise outlive your role, or even your company?
- Could a well-built twin onboard your replacement better than any documentation?
- Who owns the twin — you, your employer, or whoever trained it?
The hazards are real too. There’s a difference between preserving knowledge and commoditising judgment. When a tool captures not just what you know but how you think, the line between knowledge management and replacement gets blurry fast.
We’re early. The legal frameworks aren’t there yet. Neither are the norms.
Worth thinking about before someone else does it for you.