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 code, 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. This was a light pass on a post that already fit the standard: the title dropped to five words, the bolded paragraph runs in Investigation, Fix, and the cap section became bullet lists, Results lost one bullet that restated the fix, and Lessons Learned was cut to four short 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 code, tests, and every number matched the original commit; the agent-instructions blockquote was restored to the rule’s verbatim wording, which the post had trimmed; and Results was rewritten to say what the source shows: the errors stopped because the vendor fixed its origin, the encoding_error counter never fired in production, and a 2026-07-31 commit removed the gzip handling entirely, so the “eliminated with no invalidations” bullet and the present-tense “it stays” sentence were corrected.
Rewrite (2026-09-03): Plain-register pass, pilot for issue #66, after a reader said the posts read like AI. Archive batch 3, run after batch 2 (#69) merged. One Claude Fable 5.1 agent wrote an ELI5 of the post and redrafted the prose from it: “we” and contractions throughout, “poisoned” and “mislabeled” replaced with plain “bad” and “with no header”, the gzip magic bytes and compression bombs defined at first use, “symptom bucket” and “cap-free” said in ordinary words, and the quotable closers on the CDN bullet, the ISIZE bullet, the telemetry paragraph, and the Lessons Learned cut in favor of the fact each one was restating. Judgment calls: “surface a recurrence” in Results became “show it if the problem came back” to retire the verb; the invented quote “a vendor is sending us corrupt encodings” and the “one reactor, no thread coordination” phrase were kept verbatim as quoted text. Code blocks, headings, dates, numbers, links, and the blockquote are unchanged, and no facts were added. 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?”