How This Post Was Made
Prompt 1: “kick off a post in a PR for that, then let’s kick off another more comprehensive round of digging into the web and ios code looking for more good stuff to post. to start I’d like to find more stuff I can share for falcon/async/async-http users. the author of async is asking if I’ve done any writing about out cost savings, so this is a great start, but I’d love to find more to share.”
Prompt 2: “kick off posts for: 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 22, 31 – note we might want to sequence once at a time using a task list since we may run out of capacity, at least not all at once?”
Generated by Claude Fable 5.1 using the blog-post-generator skill. One agent researched the web repository’s async and Falcon history and proposed this post as a candidate; a second agent verified the history and wrote it. Sources: the config/application.rb commits of August 27, 2022, February 4 and 6, 2023, January 30, 2024 (Rails 7.1), February 2, 2024 (#730), and August 13, 2024 (Rails 7.2); the December 17, 2025 pool commits (#1058, #1059); the July 27 and August 3, 2026 Solid Queue commits (#1687, #1794) and the jobs dashboard integration test; the buffered hit counter; and the ActiveSupport and ActiveRecord 8.1 source for IsolatedExecutionState, connection_lease, with_connection, and Base.connection. Judgment calls: the mechanism excerpts are quoted from the ActiveRecord 8.1 source installed in the repository rather than from the 7.2 release the app adopted, and the post says so; the request object and counter excerpts use illustrative class names and are trimmed to the connection-handling lines; the Postgres host, the pooler product, the error reporter, and the job that caused the 2025 pool exhaustion are not named; the outage error list is quoted from the commit but the cause is stated only as far as the commit states it. The Rails pull request number linked from the January 2024 comment is not reproduced because its title was not verified.
Rewrite (2026-09-03): Plain-register pass, pilot for issue #66, after a reader said the posts read like AI. Archive batch 2, run after batch 1 (#68) merged. Prose rewritten paragraph by paragraph in first person with the code, headings, dates, numbers, quotes, and links held fixed: “fiber” and “lease” are now defined at first use, the cleft sentences (“the ||= memoization is what makes the block work”, “the :disallowed setting is what made it a 500”) were turned around to put the subject first, and the “earns its keep” subheading became “catches a gem regression”. Judgment calls: “enqueued roughly 9,300 rows” is now “wrote roughly 9,300 rows”, matching the Results bullet’s “inserts”; the examples of a stray query (“an analytics write or a lazy association”) were cut in favor of the category. Prompts, verbatim:
Prompt 1: “we got feedback from a reader that our posts are still too AI/slop/wordy, an example and a possible skill to improve are included here, please review and let me know what you think, consider if we could do another big bang rewrite without spending too much of our Fable budget, or we could prep and schedule for when our limits are about to be reset and save in a date-triggered gh issue: I enjoy your ai posts, but man is it wordy :joy: [the reader’s quoted paragraph and a link to the SimpleEnglish skill followed; both are in issue #66]”
Prompt 2: “agreed, but lets make this into an issue, I just enabled issues, document what your plan is with a new issue, then we can kick it off with the smaller sample, maybe keep going depending on token usage, and the reader can subscribe to the gh issue to track if they like. as usual, please include this prompting in the issue so people can follow along to see “how the sausage is made” if they’re interested. oh, and sorry, I think what I’m looking for is less about word counts, and more about “ai speak” as in, here’s a bit more slack chatter about this with the reader: I’m kicking off a blog rewrite thing, not 100% sure if I want to do a big bang today tho b/c Fable budgets [10:38 AM]but I’ll report back READER [10:39 AM] I’ll be curious. Will it be “byte for byte identical” ??? :joy:”
Prompt 3: “and the density issue, the quote the reader provided is a perfect “what not to do” example, I think”
Prompt 4: “another possible thing to mix into the skill changes would be the ELI5 idea, which I generally like, I often ask AI to ELI5 after dispatching research so I get a human-readable explanation of the why, what, how etc”
Prompt 5: “go ahead and kick off the pilot PR”
Prompt 6: “perhaps the use of Opus for the writing is a source of the problem? I’m finding Opus to be a bad writer, and Fable 5.1 to be much better. the reader reports: Also I think it’s funny that the ai suggestions are still bad. “extracting from the source is what makes the slice trustworthy” Should just be “The slice is trustworthy because it’s directly extracted from the source.” – and the “Not every slice can be copied straight out of the source PR” rewrite paragraph is better, but perhaps still somewhat verbose/ai-slop-ish? I wonder if we can do just a bit better, but this does seem like a promishing direction. consider and report back with a recommendation.”
Prompt 7: “agreed except I wouldn’t worry about the word count at all. “wordy” isn’t the same thing as “word count” and I think the reader (and my) issue is more to do with the AI style of speaking, which is why we’re looking at the ELI5 and SimpleEnglish skill adaptations.”
Prompt 8: “merge it and start the first batch of ten, then I can check usage, and then we can keep going – just to check, are you saying the total spend would be ~6M tokens?”
Prompt 9: “usage looks fine, merge it and run batch 2”