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 title lost its subtitle, the post now opens on the one-line exclusion list nobody had checked, the failure-mode commentary was split into shorter sentences, Results dropped the bullets that restated the Solution, and Lessons Learned went from seven rules to four. 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 probe date, the four failure modes, the nine-language exclusion list, the three remapped codes, and the language field and its test all matched the 2026-07-20 source-language PR and the api-localization skill. Corrections: the source count is eleven, with ten carrying the docs-derived declarations that make the 270-cell matrix; that matrix dated from the end of 2025, so “for years” became “seven months”; “every source’s declaration was wrong” became “nine of the ten needed a correction,” since one English-only source was left unchanged; the excerpts now use supported_source_languages and else super, the names the code took the day after the probe when supported_languages was renamed and the language_code helper was deleted; and the condition-code map excerpt gained the nil entry and error message from the real code.

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. Prose was redrafted from a short plain-language explanation of the post: “we” and contractions throughout, the bolded rule in The Solution unbolded and reworded (“the same text as the English one” instead of “byte-for-byte”), “byte-inequality” and “wire codes” replaced with ordinary words, the “localization opportunity” line and the “aphorism” closers in Lessons Learned cut, and Mode 1’s commentary split so each sentence carries one fact. Judgment calls: the Results bullet’s “English-only for years” was left as written, since the 2026-09-01 fact check scoped its “seven months” correction to the docs matrix, not to those two sources; the ISO 639-1 reference stays because it’s the standard’s name. Code blocks, the table, 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?”