Last-minute Halloween costumes for tech nerds

With Halloween falling on the last day of the month, TechCrunch published a tongue-in-cheek guide for builders who left costume planning to the wire, pitching ideas aimed squarely at people who follow AI news. The headline suggestions include dressing as a deceptively cute AI agent icon, a PHP vulnerability, or "sleepy time" Bryan Johnson, alongside a slate of DIY options that need little more than items already in a closet.

The most conceptually loaded option is "recursive self-improvement," a riff on warnings from AI leaders Dario Amodei and Sam Altman that the field is moving too quickly. The premise the article works from: if models become capable of recursive self-improvement, they would advance without human intervention, making efforts to pace the frontier ineffective. Rather than attempt a literal depiction of a machine building itself, the costume drops the "recursive" half and plays the self-improvement angle straight.

That translates into an outfit of aspirational resolutions: a productivity title such as Atomic Habits or a Malcolm Gladwell book, a yoga mat, and an oversized water bottle, with constant references to an Oura Ring sleep score. The performance detail is leaving the party mid-night under the stated pretext of going to therapy, and treating oneself as the embodiment of someone perpetually trying to get better.

A second idea targets the recent wave of assistant avatars from Meta and OpenAI, described as creepily cute — innocent-looking on the surface, which the article compares to the way Elizabeth Holmes's presentation invited underestimation. Construction is simple: get voluminous with a puffer jacket or colorful feather boas, add a distinctive hat or glasses, and wear a colorful shirt with matching bottoms to evoke ChatGPT Dot. The running gag for the night is repeatedly asking other guests for read/write access to their Gmail.

Surveillance gets its own costume: cheap glasses with a large red or white circle stuck to one lens, mimicking a recording light, or plain glasses labeled as someone recording with the light covered. The article explicitly asks wearers not to actually record anyone without consent. A related Holmes bit — black turtleneck, blonde wig or natural blonde hair — is presented as gated, while Mark Zuckerberg's recent run of slightly oversized, boxy black T-shirts is flagged as an easy grab-and-go option, illustrated with a David Paul Morris/Bloomberg photograph.

What to watch is less the outfits than the vocabulary behind them: whether "pacing the frontier," agent permissions, and avatar design stay in the tech discourse through the rest of the year, and which of these references readers will still recognize a Halloween from now.