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 two runs and their figures, each pipeline phase and the contract say their part once, the case study closes with what shipped and what it cost in place of a Results section, and Lessons Learned went from eleven bullets to five. 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 41-to-168 jump took eleven days (2026-07-15 to 07-26), not a month; 81,000 lines was the third pack alone, so the catalog total (about 173,000 lines) is now stated separately; the copies-not-references contract is dated to 2026-07-26 and the post now records that the skill retired it on 2026-08-21 in favor of styles sharing the real views, and the stat-chart rewrite is described as proceeding behind a flag rather than shipped. The Swift test excerpt now matches the real file, the locale config is described as 28 entries (English plus the 27 translated locales), and the Android professional post-editing pass is recorded as waived on 2026-07-31 rather than still pending.
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. The prose now calls the isolation contract a rule (the title, slug, and h2 keep “contract”), defines orchestrator and the codemod’s anchor at first use, drops the clefts and closers (“coupling is what turns”, “the boundary is an assertion, not a convention”, “undocumented debt is the kind that surprises you”), and settles on one word each for drift, the debug flag, the check, and the catalog entry. Judgment calls: the five aesthetic families and the six hard rules stay as lists because they are the facts, not decoration; “verifier” and “gate” became “check” everywhere except the quoted rules. 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”