Today I wrote down two tips, and both felt too dumb to post.
The first one: I moved the shortcut that cancels my dictation away from Escape. I kept pressing Escape for something else and losing everything I had just said. The second one: I told Claude to give a yellow background to every sentence it changes in my blog drafts, so I can see where to look.
A keyboard shortcut and a yellow background. You read that and think, sure, that's obvious, anybody would come up with that.
I didn't. I lost my dictation that way many times before I moved the shortcut. And I had published 99 posts on this blog when the yellow background occurred to me today. The post about the shortcut went out the same evening as my 100th. I never thought I'd write a hundred of them. I thought blogs were dead.
When I started programming in 2005, I was 14 and tutorials were the best thing there was. You wanted to build something, you didn't know how, and somebody walked you through the steps. The how was the hard part.
It isn't anymore. With AI I can build almost anything I can think of. I'd been programming for twenty years and couldn't build an iOS app. With Claude I built one. The steps got cheap. What's left is thinking of the thing in the first place, and you can't ask for something that never crossed your mind.
So I think a different kind of content matters now. I don't need another explanation of how to do something. I want to see how somebody else thinks about the thing they're solving. What annoyed them, what they changed, why. It doesn't teach a skill. It shows people that the same problem could be handled differently, and they take it from there with what they already know about their own projects.
I think people already sense this. What they do with it is wrong, though. Skills for Claude Code get shared everywhere right now, and skills for AI in general, and people feel that once they install somebody's design skill, design is taken care of. I don't see it that way at all.
To me it's the same as highlighting passages in a book. I highlight for myself. Sometimes my wife and I read the same book, about relationships or about raising kids. I mark it in yellow, she marks it in green. And you can see that completely different things speak to each of us. In the same book, each of us is looking for something else.
A ready-made skill is like that. It belongs to the one person or the one team that tuned it and tested it, with their needs, their knowledge and the state they were in at that moment. It's not a universal solution. What I can take from it is how they thought about the problem. The rest I have to do myself.
Most readers will shrug at a shortcut and a yellow background. That's fine. But there's always a group it never occurred to, and with these two I was in it myself. For that group it opens a box that was closed until then.
I once wrote that people follow you for how you think, not for what you talk about. Now I'd say how you think is the thing worth posting.
So I'm posting both, the shortcut and the yellow background. Then I'll wait and see whose box it opens.
