You are staying connected to the work
Five fragments for the week of December 8, 2025
Hello from the second-to-last Diagonal edition of the year. This week, #99. Next week, #100.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
1) Instead of having Claude Code make a PR, ask it to output a Markdown doc with a deep, detailed guide for a dev to implement the change, including teaching you background and context about the broader surrounding system, and rationale behind why we’re doing things a certain way. Tell it to be very exhaustive and ultrathink. (The result should be go way more in-depth than a typical plan mode output, it may take a while so I tee this up well in advance)
2) Read the resulting doc. And then code it yourself! Use Cursor to go faster: tab complete is your friend. You can also use the Composer model in Cursor Agent to fast-forward thru tedious bits -- but avoid using slower models or doing too much AI work at one time. You are staying connected to the work and going step by step. Think about it as you go, correct course as needed. Go off-script from the tutorial doc whenever you want.
– Geoffrey Litt on X, November 21, 2025. I like this a lot and it makes me think of non-coding parallels. I do love building demo workspaces at work (“my little dollhouses”) and do something similar with Claude that makes the process feel paint-by-numbers but with sparks of understanding and authorship.
She ate her sandwich in the canvas tent MGM had given her as a dressing room. “I always thought they got me mixed up with the actual Witch,” she says. “They must have thought that witches didn’t have very nice dressing rooms, because mine was simply awful. It was a square of canvas, and the floor had some sort of dirty-looking rug on it, and there was one chair and a card table with a light over it.” Once or twice when Billie Burke was not on the set, Margaret Hamilton finished off her lunch by standing inside Miss Burke’s dressing room with its pink satin walls and pink chaise-longue ‘and the little fur rug next to the chaise-longue which she could step onto when she was through taking her rest.’
– Aljean Harmetz, The Making of The Wizard of Oz, October 1, 2013. This section is about the dressing rooms of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) vs. Glinda (Billie Burke). Too real.
There’s increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics.
– Patrick Collison on X, December 8, 2025. Part of a longer post, but the “slot & slop” formulation struck me—I’d never heard it before.
Speed and reliability are often intuited hand-in-hand. Speed can be a good proxy for general engineering quality. If an application slows down on simple tasks, then it can mean the engineers aren’t obsessive detail sticklers. Not always, but it can mean disastrous other issues lurk. I want all my craftspeople to stickle.
– Craig Mod, “Fast Software, the Best Software,” July 2019. Thanks to Marcin for sending over this six-years-oldie-but-goodie. To stickle!
I just feel like I was really bad at life as a kid and then aged 18-35 was AWESOME because I’m really good at using a computer and now that my life has become more oriented in “real world tasks” it’s sad and frustrating to be so bad at everything again
– Maia Bittner on X, December 5, 2025. Same.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com