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 usage and proposed this as a pattern catalogue; a second agent verified each idiom against the source and wrote the post. Sources: the source base class and one adapter, the forecast controller’s around-action, the request counter and its buffered variant, the GraphQL field extension and schema, the mock delay source, the Rack timeout middleware, the database skill’s negative-result note, and the commits of September 10 to 15, 2021, May 18, 2022, March 10 to April 1, 2025, December 12, 2025, and May 17, 2026. Gem behavior was read from async 2.44.0 (Semaphore#async, Barrier#stop, the Sync and Async kernel methods).

Judgment calls: class and method names are illustrative; the counter is described as a per-request counter with no business semantics; the source whose endpoints depend on a location lookup is not named; the controller excerpt omits its environment guards and says so; the 2021 contributor is credited as a contributor rather than by name; the link to the ActiveRecord post assumes that post is published.

Rewrite (2026-09-03): Plain-register pass, pilot for issue #66, after a reader said the posts read like AI. Archive batch 4, run after batch 3 (#70) and the prompts move (#71) merged. Rewrote the prose in plain register: first person and contractions, cleft constructions and nominalizations turned around (“the barrier can’t interrupt”, “the wrappers are there because”), and “structured cancellation”, “connection lease”, “per-leg”, and “surfaces as” replaced with ordinary words, with memoize and semaphore defined at first use. Judgment calls: kept “shape” as the one name for the patterns because the title uses it; kept “the deferred variant” undefined rather than add a claim about what it does; kept “the base class has never had two” as stated rather than restate it; summary rewritten in the same register. Code blocks, headings, dates, numbers, and links are unchanged. 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”

Prompt 10: “usage is fine, please continue – one more thing – at the end (or perhaps with future batches?) I’d like to change the “How This Post Was Made” sections in all posts to not have the prompt in the post itself, rather, the prompts should be moved into PR body if editable, or comments, then the “How This Post Was Made” can have the last edit date and a link to the Pull Requests / Prompts – then there’s less cruft at the end for readers that just want to copy paste a post into their agent – wdyt?”

Prompt 11: “sounds good”

Prompt 12: “for the “How This Post Was Made” maybe we move the date down there as well, so it’s like first posted by MODEL on DATE, last edited by MODEL on DATE, View: PROMPTS, HISTORY or something along those lines, so it’s all in one place?”

Prompt 13: “agreed, go”