I use Claude Code. I like Claude Code. According to Steve Yegge’s Eight-Circuit Model of Claudesciousness, I’m a pretty solid Stage 6, edging into 7 on heavy days. I think most engineers, most of the time, can get most of their work done faster with one of these tools than not, although the force multiplier of that speedup is probably not as extreme as it is in my case. Why is that?
At least one accident of history stands out to me: I can touch type. In fact, I am a fairly proficient touch typist. The default 30-second session on Monkeytype benchmarks me as being able to type around 100 English words per minute, with around 98% accuracy.
In the world of competitive typists this is entry level. But compared to the average office worker I probably type memos about twice as fast. From the inside it truly does feel as though I am able to scribe marks on the digital cuneiform tablet almost as quickly as I can imagine them.
This doesn’t matter much much when programming by hand. But I think it turns out to matter more than you think when barking at an agent. Being able to give the agent twice as many words before your own irritation hits a boiling point and you hit enter, over and over again, probably results in solutions that are much more targeted than baseline.
What’s more, this is probably true regardless of any other techniques you do or do not employ. For example, like most seasoned Claude Code users, I make liberal use of the Control-G shortcut to open up a tiny dedicated text editor for my next prompt, much like what Ctrl-X, Ctrl-E does in your terminal in general. I also use Plan Mode religiously, even for the smallest of changes (even better nowadays because Plan Mode can automatically clear the conversation on each new plan). But even before I did any of that people would see the way I interacted with the system and say, “Whoa, you get really detailed with your prompts.” And when I asked them why they didn’t give more details themselves, they usually just said “I don’t know, it gets annoying to have to think that hard.”
But you’re already thinking that hard when you use these kinds of tools. You might as well get it on the page.