Productivity

You install Codex CLI. You launch it with excitement and tell it to “Fix the broken tests in this repo,” and then the nightmare begins: Codex: I want to run pytest Allow? (y/n) You press y. Immediately, this pops up: Codex: I want to modify test_user.py Allow? (y/n) So, you press y. Again, and again, and again. Every file it wants to read, every command it wants to run, every line it wants to modify. Confirm, confirm, confirm. It’s like working with an intern that asks permission for everything. ...

In 2004, Lawrence Lessig sent out a mass email to his entire contact list saying, more or less: “Sorry, I deleted all your emails without reading them. If it was important, send it again.” He had spent 80 hours that week trying to empty an inbox cluttered with emails dating back to 2002. He was getting 200 emails per day. Lessig wasn’t disorganized. He was a Law Professor at Stanford. And even so, email defeated him. ...

Claude Code includes a slash command called /simplify that automatically reviews your code. I ran it on a hefty diff — about 500 lines across 8 files — and the results were… interesting. It found things I wouldn’t have noticed, but it also wasted my time pointing out stuff that didn’t matter. So, I took it apart and rebuilt it piece by piece. What Does /simplify Do? It’s a skill that comes bundled with Claude Code (you don’t install it). It launches three agents in parallel, each looking at the same diff from a different angle: ...

For months, I’ve been running Claude Code tasks using a homemade cron. A Bash script that starts a headless session, feeds it a prompt, waits for it to finish, and then closes. It works. Barely, but it works. I’ve got it up on GitHub if anyone’s interested. Then on Friday, with version 2.1.71, Anthropic introduced /loop. A native scheduler. Built directly into Claude Code sessions. My first reaction was: “They killed my project.” ...

My wife summons Charlie Munger to plan our family budget. In ChatGPT. I’m not joking. She tells it something like “act as Charlie Munger reviewing our family finances” and feeds it our monthly expenses. The thing returns insights like “you’re confusing investment with expense in the education category” or “that fund has a hidden cost you’re not accounting for.” Things Munger would say. With the tone Munger would use. I did the same thing. But instead of an investor, I summoned a different expert: Edward Tufte. ...

Less than a month ago I wrote an entire post explaining how to use three memory layers with Claude Code: Linear for strategy, Beads for tactics, and Tasks for execution. A nice, elegant pyramid. Yeah, no. Today I’m retiring Beads. Not on a whim, but because reality has made it abundantly clear that a tool causing more problems than it solves isn’t a tool. It’s dead weight. What Beads Brought to the Table For those who didn’t read the original post, Beads was a git-backed issue tracker. A Claude Code plugin that stored issues in JSONL files inside your repo. Brilliant idea on paper: ...

The Single Checkout Bottleneck I’m developing a macOS menu bar app. I have three features in the backlog: a consumption sparkline, native notifications, and a desktop widget. All three are independent. I’m building all three with Claude Code. The problem: Claude Code works in one directory. One directory has one branch. And git checkout is like a single-lane roundabout: only one gets through. If I want to advance all three simultaneously, my classic options are: ...

“Didn’t we decide this yesterday?” I was migrating my email out of Google. I’d spent two Claude Code sessions working on it: issues in Linear, decisions made, scripts executed. I open a third session and ask “what’s left pending from the degoogle?” Silence. Total amnesia. It’s like working with a brilliant teammate who shows up to the office every morning with absolutely no memory of what you did the day before. Not the decisions, not the mistakes, not the discoveries. Every session is a blank slate. ...

Two Predictions About You I’m going to go out on a limb with two predictions: Your professional success is largely due to an algorithm you master without knowing it. You’re worried that your kids apparently don’t use it. The first one is correct. The second… well, it might not be the problem you think it is. The algorithms are called Breadth First Search (BFS) and Depth First Search (DFS). Even if they don’t ring a bell, I guarantee they’re old friends. Your brain has been using them for millions of years. ...

The crime scene Zaragoza, Hotel Pilar Plaza café. A latte, views of the basilica, and yours truly with a shiny new MacBook Air M3 ready to work a couple hours with Claude Code before a meeting. Two hours later: battery at 15%. Red alert. Panic. But how? I was just in a terminal writing code. No video, no Zoom, nothing that would justify this kind of consumption. I open Activity Monitor, Energy tab, and there’s the culprit: Ghostty, with an accumulated consumption of 3,600 over the last 12 hours. For context, Brave Browser consumed 125. Zoom with video, 99. Claude (desktop app), 46. ...