How This Post Was Made
Prompt 1: “it’s been a while since we added any blog posts, see recent work in the ~/Code/helloweather projects, dispatch opus agents to search for interesting stuff that we’ve done since the last blog post, perhaps one or more agents per repo, then review and consider and come up with a proposed list of blog posts we might consider.”
Prompt 2: “draft posts for [the approved shortlist] – create one pr for the repo main / skills update we just did, then one pr per post for the approved list”
Research by one Claude agent per repo mining git history since the previous post; this draft was written by a dedicated agent from that research plus the underlying commits and skill files, then reviewed before publishing.
Rewrite (2026-09-01): Part of an archive-wide rewrite. The owner asked, “with Fable 5.1, supposedly the writing quality is much better, I’m wondering if we should do a pass on all of the blog posts we have so far to improve them. should we start with the latest one?” and, after a pilot on the worktrees post, “I like the rewrite in any case and we have a lot of Fable capacity at the moment, should we go for it and dispatch an initial round of research to improve our skills, agents.md, etc and then dispatch sub-agents to rewrite each post? this could be done in a single PR, I think.” Four Claude Fable 5.1 agents surveyed the archive to settle the voice and structure rules now in the blog-post-generator skill, and one agent rewrote this post under them. The post now opens on the July 2026 run of failed fixes rather than a general observation, the title dropped its subtitle, stacked sentences were split throughout, and Lessons Learned went from ten bullets to five that the body does not already state as headings or bolded rules. Code blocks, dates, numbers, links, and headings are unchanged, and no facts were added.
Fact check (2026-09-01): The owner asked, “1) dispatch research into the ~/Code/helloweather repos to validate the posts’ content, for example checking the StoreKit code we shared is correct. 2) fix the “Pre-existing oddities” using your judgement, and feel free to make “judgment calls” as you see fit – this is a blog meant to be authored by AI and is expected to lean on AI model judgement calls, advancements in model capabilities may prompt future editing/rewriting sessions, and for each one I’ll want them to be driven autonomously.” One Claude Fable 5.1 agent checked this post’s code excerpts, numbers, dates, and quoted rules against the source repositories. The skill blockquote was replaced with the current six-bullet wording (a user checkpoint and a digest-as-filter bullet were added 2026-08-04, and the read-only and convergence bullets were reworded), the process description gained the checkpoint step, and the web copy was located in the reviewbot skill rather than a code-review skill. The claims-audit example now matches the stat-card plan (two widths over the 128pt bar; the harness came from the implementer dry-run), the iOS location-caching round’s third lens was corrected to plan-conformance, the widget-plan finding is no longer attributed to a specific lens, the Android fix is noted as still on an open release branch, and the Sentry plan is described as retired when sentry-ruby 6.7.0 shipped. The 133-pair sweep, 10.8%, the refutation commit title, the Android rule quote, and the web debug-flag findings were confirmed as written.
Rewrite (2026-09-03): Plain-register pass, pilot for issue #66, after a reader said the posts read like AI. Archive batch 1, run after the pilot (#67) merged. The prose was rewritten from a short plain-language explanation: third-person distance became “we”, cleft constructions and nominalizations were unwound, and “adversarial” now appears only where it names the practice or the skill section, with “separate” or “independent” for reviewers and rounds. Judgment calls: “entitlement” and “lens” are defined at first use, Swift’s “trap” became “crash”, the sweep’s “adversarial coordinate pairs” became “pairs chosen to break the fix”, and the h2 “Independence Is the Whole Trick” stays because headings are held fixed. 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?”