Matt Jankowski. Janks to most of us. He was one of my co-authors on Storm Applied. How that came about isn’t all that interesting. Manning approached Janks about writing a book, and one thing led to another, and eventually there I was, sharing the byline.
Then we tried to actually make the book. We’d sit down to write. What came out wasn’t what we wanted. We’d try a different angle. What came out the next time wasn’t what we wanted either. That kept happening. For a long while.
We were going to fail. Manning was hinting at cancellation, or at handing the book over to other authors. None of us had written a book before. Sure, we knew what we wanted to make, but we had no idea how to get there.
What worked, once we finally got going, was simple. I’d put on The Jam, headphones on, and just write. No structure. No images. No polish. Just a mass of content coming out the other end. Sometimes it flowed for hours and read like real thinking. Sometimes it was disjointed and barely connected. Either way, I’d send it to Janks. He’d take it, structure it, add images, turn it into something Manning might actually publish.
That division of labor wasn’t an aesthetic choice. Janks had a young kid. Janks didn’t have the time to sit down for hours and get into deep flow the way the writing part needed. We were doing this in “spare time” (and if you ever find yourself thinking about writing a book in your spare time, do yourself a favor and don’t). But for the role Janks took on, spare time worked. He could pick the work up in pieces, shape it, set it down, come back. The role he took was the role he had time for. The role I took was the role that I enjoy; being a firehose of thoughts.
Fast forward a bunch of years. After a long gap, I’ve been writing more lately. Blog posts. Technical writeups. The occasional thing where I sit down with a pile of half-thoughts and try to make something out of them. Same mode I always used. Just write. Get it out. Don’t think about structure.
But there’s no Janks on the other end of the hand-off anymore. Different jobs, different lives, you know how it goes. So those piles of half-thoughts — they have to find their way to a finished thing some other way.
For years they didn’t. I’d do the part I enjoy. I’d get the mass of unstructured stuff out and tell myself I’d come back later and shape it into something publishable. Months would pass. Sometimes years. By the time I came back, it felt dated. Or I didn’t quite remember what I was on about anymore. Or my thinking had moved on. Sometimes all three. Into the trash it went.
Adding a little structure isn’t hard. I just couldn’t be bothered to do it. It was one of those little things you know you should do, but just can’t bring yourself to do it. I hate those little things, but man, life sure is full of them, isn’t it?
I’ve written before about using Claude to write code. This isn’t that. This is Claude as the partner on the other end of the writing hand-off. I take the mass of stuff. I hand it to Claude. I ask for a structure. This seems to work for me. Probably because it is much easier for me to respond to someone else’s strawman structure than create one myself.
Usually, I don’t like what Claude proposes. That’s fine. The not-liking is doing real work, even though it feels like the opposite. Having Claude propose a structure is a forcing function. It’s like how I make “important decisions” — I do it by flipping a coin. Not because I love random chance. Because the flip puts an option in front of me and it makes me react. Either it lands and I go with it or it lands and I realize I really don’t want to go with it. Either way, a decision gets made.
Claude proposing a structure works like that coin flip. One concrete thing in front of me to react to, instead of an infinite blur of options I could spin up on my own. The reacting is what unblocks me.
And here’s the funny part. The thing that actually ships almost never looks like what Claude handed me. I’ll take Claude’s structure, decide most of it is wrong, throw half of it out, rearrange the rest, and end up somewhere completely different. You could look at the before and the after side by side and ask, well, what did Claude even do here? Why bother? Except without Claude doing it in the first place, without that something-to-react-to sitting in front of me, I’d still be staring at the same pile of half-thoughts. The same pile I was staring at last month. And the month before that.
Janks did a lot. I had to create the content. He did the rest.
With Claude, I do all the work.
Janks kept the Sean in what we wrote. Claude doesn’t.
LLMs don’t have taste, not by default. They’re a random walk to the mean. That mean-regression is what strips the Sean out of any writing they touch. Not malice. Not bad design. Just the math of how they work.
And it’s frustrating. There’s all this me in what I send over. All this character. And then, poof. Gone. Washed out. Smoothed over. I have to go back in and put it back. Sometimes more than one pass to put it back.
In that respect, Claude is a lot like Manning. The difference is that with Claude I can fight it. With Manning, gone was just gone.
I’ve taught Claude my voice in instructions. Somewhat effective. What those instructions really buy me isn’t an editor like Janks was. It’s an editorial sparring partner that mostly knows when I’m being me and when I’m not. That isn’t Janks’s editing. But it’s something. And on the days when I have the patience for the back-and-forth, it’s not nothing.
