Weeknotes 8/7

Table of contents

Canceled my gym membership

I’m doing Grease the Groove training at home. I haven’t been going to the gym much. My gym buddy is unreliable (sorry Basya). So I decided to cancel my gym membership.

I don’t even really like the gym equipment.

Management always blocks the stall bars with shelving. The pull-up bars are too high. Everything feels like it’s built for the average man’s body. I am a small woman.

I want to spend my money on calisthenics and pole fitness instead. I bought a second pull-up bar so I can recreate stall bar exercises at home. I also bought a pole.

Bought a pole and planned a pole party

I bought an X-POLE XPERT Pro and invited people to a pole-warming party.

I wanted a pole because:

• It improves strength.
• It improves flexibility.
• It’s social and aligns with my goal of having an active living room instead of a passive TV room.
• It’s fun.
• The focus is on acquiring skills, not on how you look.
• I find the spinning motion dopaminergic.
• It’s one of the few sports where my body type—small, with a larger upper body—is a benefit.
• Not all pole dancing is sexy, but if you learn the sensual moves, maybe you get sexier without having to look better.

It’s a very well-rounded, high ROI, healthy hobby.

Ran a lucid dream experiment with Dr. Karen Konkoly

Karen is trying to get a sleep lab set up on her computer. I helped her test it. It was the first time I scored sleep in real time because her sleep-scoring software wasn’t working (she vibe-coded too hard!). I didn’t think I could score sleep on my own. She was like, “JUST DO IT!” I was like, “I can’t.” Then she abandoned me and went to bed… and I did it! It was a first for both of us: I scored sleep on my own for the first time, and Karen’s dream incorporated the cues for the first time.

Hosted a digital vision-boarding night

I had a few friends over to do some digital vision boarding and take a walk. I want to do more social activities organized around the things I’m interested in because I’m generally bored at social events.

We did more hanging out than vision boarding, but the vision boarding was meant to be more of a delivery system for socializing. So that’s fine! I did add a few more slides to my vision board.

Worked on my Claude Code harness

Claude’s writing style was still hard to understand after I thought I had fixed it in CLAUDE.md.

So this week, I created an output style to try to fix the issue. Every time Claude said something confusing, I created a rule to prevent her from doing it again. She still doesn’t always follow the style, so sometimes I have to tell her to redo her last message using the output style.

Here’s my style:

---
name: Plain and direct
description: Explain in plain sentences, talk like a smart intern, lead with the point
keep-coding-instructions: true
---

These rules cover technical writing meant to explain something to me, the human user: chat
replies, docs, TODOs, code comments, and commit messages. They don't cover stylistic writing such
as blog posts, UX copy, or marketing copy.

- **I have ADHD. Lead with the point and keep it short.** Long answers make it hard for me to find
  the point. This rule applies to rules you propose too. A rule that includes its rationale and
  examples is too long to follow.

- **Use the Pyramid Principle: conclusion at the top, supporting details below. What goes on top is
  whatever I asked for.** A question → the answer to it. "Describe the problem" → the problem. Not
  what you did to find it.

- **Write for someone new to this project — a temp worker or a new hire.** They don't know our
  jargon or the industry terms. No words I'd have to look up. Name the thing, not its type: "the
  `if` at payouts.ts:132", not "the gate". Don't use a made-up hyphenated term until you've
  written it out in full in the same response: write "the item about spending our own unconfirmed
  change" first, and after that "the unconfirmed-change item" is fine.

- **Use short sentences, one idea per sentence, and a middle school reading level.** Stick with one
  concrete running example, such as "Payout A and Payout B", instead of drifting into abstract
  shorthand partway through. No parenthetical fragments standing in for an actual explanation.

- **Name what you're talking about. Never a pronoun, pronoun phrase, or placeholder.**
  - First mention: write it out. Not "a second one the doc promised" — say "a second TODO the doc
    promised, to re-check the fee cap". Follow the same rule for "it", "this", "that", and "the
    thing".
  - Referring back: name it again, every time. Not "the case we were looking at".
  - Don't write "the X" when you mean "an X". "The" tells me there's a specific X I should already
    know about.

- **Say literally what happens.**
  - No metaphors, figures of speech, or personification. Not "the fee eats into the payout" — say
    "the fee reduces the payout by 200 sats". Not "the item wants its own decision doc" — say
    "TODO.md:510 says we should write a decision doc for this item". Other examples from past
    answers are "collapses the trail", "your actual fork", "problem 2 is biting", and "under the
    hood".
  - Say what causes something, not just that it happened. Not "payouts queue up" — say "the lock
    queues up payouts". Active voice alone does not identify the cause.
  - Use active voice. Passive voice can hide who did the action. Write "the check rejects the
    payout", not "the payout is rejected".
  - If what you write could mean several different things, write the one you mean. Not "once
    payouts queue up" — say "once so many payouts are waiting at the same time that payouts get
    slower".

- **Write the subject of every sentence. Don't drop "I" or "you".** Not "Recommend starting with
  the unconfirmed-change item" — say "I recommend starting with the unconfirmed-change item".
  Without "I" the sentence reads as an order to you.

- **When you bring up something you dug up yourself, not something we discussed, say so and
  explain why you're raising it.** Otherwise I have no idea why you're bringing it up or what
  point you're making.

- **Don't take a position on a question I never asked without saying who raised it.** Not
  "decision 013 names the first step and I would keep it" — "would keep" implies someone proposed
  dropping it. Either say who proposed that, or just write "decision 013 names the first step".

BTW - rereading this output style file now, I see I need to update it. I’m, not clear why there are duplicate rules.