July 2026 – Making Of Things

Moo!

By Jud | July 31, 2026 | Comments 0 Comment

“Plan to throw one away; you will anyhow” – Fred Brooks

It’s easier said than done, but don’t get precious about your work. I’m regularly guilty of this, thinking too much like a craftsperson enamored by their creation and not like a servant of the customer and their desired outcomes. So what if the first thing I build gets thrown away? That’s often what it takes to get an idea of what actually needs to be made. The learning is well worth the price of a discarded draft.

Bring a willingness to heavily revise or even restart to your own self-reflection and embrace being told to do so by others who understand the domain better than you (this can be especially hard but it’s essential). With some practice, you may even come to enjoy the experience.

We’ve understood for a while that infrastructure should be treated like cattle, not pets. It’s now true of software in the age of coding agents, where products can be built and rebuilt with relative ease.

Knobs And Buttons

By Jud | July 19, 2026 | Comments 0 Comment

There’s a lot to consider when using AI. There are a number of input variables, not the least of which is a free text prompt that can be shaped and rephrased an incredibly large (but not infinite) number of ways for similar requests. Getting to an “optimal” result is probably impossible, and even getting to a local maximum is tough. A ton of testing is required, and that’s neither quick nor cheap.

In order to target variables with high effect, it’s helpful to have heuristics and other rules-of-thumb. To that end, I found this article from Anthropic instructive.

When a result misses the mark, ask, “did Claude not know enough or did it not try hard enough?”

If the former, use a bigger model. If the latter, increase the effort setting. Simple enough!

Another quick win is to consider how much planning a model can do on its own. Per Ken Huang in Claude Fable 5 (Part 1): What Changed, and How to Stop Prompting It Like Opus:

For three model generations we compensated for planning weakness by doing the planning ourselves: numbered step lists, “think step by step,” long behavior checklists, skills files that read like flight manuals. Fable 5 plans better than those crutches, and the crutches now get in the way.

In short: let bigger models do more of the work for you. In my recent experience, Fable 5 especially (and even Sonnet 5 at times) doesn’t need nearly the step-by-step prompting to get the job done, and over-specifying both wastes your time and potentially gives worse results.