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 ran a research pass over the web repository looking for material relevant to Falcon and async-http users and proposed this post as a candidate; a second agent verified the claims and wrote it. Sources: the async-http client hygiene plan (decisions dated 2026-08-21), the two open pull requests and their review thread (opened 2026-08-21, one closed and reopened 2026-08-31), the client wrapper and source base class, and the installed gem source for async-http 0.102.0, async-pool 0.12.0, and protocol-http 0.71.0, read directly to confirm the retry clauses, the Internet#call block form, Pool::Controller#acquire, and the writable body’s read.

Judgment calls: the code block combines both pull requests into one wrapper and is trimmed and renamed, which the post says; the app’s transport-error mapping is described as the reviewed-and-rejected first draft rather than shown, since the smaller replacement is not yet pushed. The 1% invoice gap is attributed to “one vendor” without a name. The vendors on the shared instance are described by what they do, not by product. The gem version note (plan verified at 0.100.0, lockfile at 0.102.0) was added after reading the 0.102.0 release notes and confirming the retry logic is unchanged.

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. Every paragraph and the summary were redrafted from an ELI5 of the post; code, headings, numbers, links, and facts are unchanged. Judgment calls: “surface” as a verb was replaced in four places with “show up” or “expose”; “origin” was replaced with “vendor” or “host” so each thing keeps one name; the two quotable closers (“the scope that is both safe and warm”, “a decision someone made for you”) were restated as plain 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”