Actually, asking a Hinge date for her bloodwork is just basic due diligence

Last Tuesday, I sat across from a perfectly nice UI/UX designer at a natural wine bar in Hayes Valley and asked her if she had a family history of macular degeneration. She stood up, threw her twenty-two-dollar orange wine in my face, and walked out. The mainstream media would call this a failed date. I call it a successful early-stage filter.

Over the past week, a moral panic has gripped the less-driven corners of San Francisco following reports that AI founders are treating first dates like job interviews. People are apparently outraged that builders are demanding medical histories, optimizing for efficiency, and asking algorithmic screening questions before ordering appetizers. They accuse us of draining the romance from human connection, as if romance is something other than an unoptimized data-gathering protocol fraught with human error.

I have to ask: what exactly is the alternative? Stumbling blindly into a long-term resource-sharing agreement based on vibes? When you are racing to build artificial general intelligence, your personal life is just another vector for systemic risk. If I am going to allocate fifteen to twenty percent of my weekly compute to a secondary biological entity, I need to know her genetic stack is robust enough to justify the burn rate.

If we break romance down from first principles, a relationship is simply a high-stakes co-founder search where the eventual product is a child and the runway is your remaining fertile years. Why would I apply less rigor to selecting the mother of my future progeny than I do to hiring a junior front-end developer for a project that will pivot in six months anyway?

Croft is right. The pushback comes entirely from people who view time as an infinite resource. Why spend six months slowly discovering that your partner has a family history of early-onset heart disease and a fundamental misunderstanding of tokenomics when you could surface those blockers before the water is even poured?

Consider my recent coffee meeting with an Anthropic researcher. I sent my standard pre-date calendar invite, which includes a link to a secure portal for her to upload her recent bloodwork, her last three performance reviews, and a brief essay on how she handles context-window degradation during high-stress familial disputes. She replied asking if I was joking. I immediately canceled the meeting. A lack of asynchronous communication skills is a massive red flag.

To streamline the funnel even further, I have recently deployed a custom LLM trained on my past successful and failed relationships. Before I even look at a profile, my agent engages with their agent to negotiate baseline parameters: acceptable genetic predispositions, target net worth by 2035, and willingness to tolerate my quarterly silent retreats in modular cabins. If the agents cannot reach a preliminary consensus, the human layer is never bothered.

The critics argue that this approach eliminates the magic of courtship. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of magic. Magic is when two highly optimized individuals synergize perfectly because they have already run the simulations. Last month, I went on a highly successful walk with a product manager who brought a deck outlining her historical churn rate with previous partners and a Pareto analysis of her emotional triggers. It was the most romantic forty-five minutes of my life.

I appreciated Sarah's candor, but her vision lacked scale. A farmers market is a localized, low-leverage weekend activity. A mother-in-law containment strategy is core infrastructure.

We are living through the most important technological renaissance in human history. The builders of tomorrow cannot be weighed down by the legacy inefficiencies of twentieth-century courtship. So yes, I will continue to ask for a comprehensive medical history on the first date. If you cannot handle a simple audit of your biological technical debt, you simply are not ready to build together.