I needed a way to make diagrams for posts and papers. The requirements were simple: something I could mostly just ask Claude to create, something that looked decent for scientific work, and something I could edit afterward — not a PNG I’d have to regenerate from scratch every time I wanted to move a box.
A friend who drives a lot asked if there was an audio version of my posts. There wasn’t. So I looked into it — and it turned out to be absurdly easy.
Continue reading →I’ve been noticing something about how I work with Claude. It’s not dramatic — no moment where the model led me off a cliff and I realized too late. It’s more of a drift. The models have gotten good enough that my default reaction to most outputs is “yeah, that’s probably right.” And most of the time it is. But “most of the time” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Opus 4.6 came out ~20 hours ago and I wanted to get a feel for it. It also seemed like a good chance to follow up on some of the ideas from my previous post — specifically, building small tools that help me stay more engaged with my own work rather than just producing output.1
I wrote about this more fully in cognitive offloading, exoskeletons, and remaining sentient. ↩
How can someone who enjoys thinking — enjoys the cognitive load — use coding agents and LLMs to foster continued learning, and not skill degradation? And what are some useful mental frameworks to have in mind?