Mike Caulfield

Softerware Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance

The point of the new "skills-based" architectures (like Cowork, or Code used in the moment with skills) is to solve this conundrum. But it only works if you use it as "softerware" -- and stop producing reams of code! Anyway, more here: mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/softerware

Code is a burden, and the less of it you have to worry about the better your life will be.

Coding tools in the hands of amateurs solved the fumbling around; people started building code to solve their problems. But amateurs quickly got introduced to the first rule of codebases -- coding makes processes brittle and inflexible.

LLMs without the coding tools piece solved that by writing a lot of code in the moment structured around the problem at hand. That gave people some of the flexibility of the human process. But it also resulted in a world where you had to sit around and watch the LLM fumble around for hours sometimes

The way things work is this -- you have a human process, it has a wonderful flexibility but it is slow, or tedious, or whatever. You build code and now it is faster and more efficient -- but also more brittle.

Softerware Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance

A bit about a pattern I've been seeing in how ordinary people are using coding tools in probably unproductive ways. If you are new to coding, you may thing the problem you want to solve is build more things. The reality is you want to build *less* things.

Softerware Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance

Softerware (new post) share.google/T1AajhhxRprb...

Softerware Keep your Claude skills loose for better performance

Softerware (new post) share.google/T1AajhhxRprb...

Ok now I am worried

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I'll follow you back temporarily for a short question

I think this gap is EXTREMELY real in a business sense and yet there is also the revealed other thing here which is a great deal of people in the world will never be remotely of interest to SaaS, and we know it, and those people still have needs suited to software

Post Amy Siskind @amysiskind.com WH press secretary Karoline Leavitt tells Fox News that a military draft is on the table. 4:19 PM • Mar 8, 2026 CEverybody can reply 276 reposts 699 quotes 685 likes 36 saves 184 ① 975 685

This is an irresponsible, misleading post that misrepresents what Leavitt said. There's enough awful stuff happening. Don't confuse people.

Sorry I'm 3 days late, I was eating a pomegranate.

Please please read this from the archbishop of Chicago

www.archchicago.org/statement/-/...

I get that nothing matters until the NY Times reports it, but some of us more independent outlets had this story a month ago...

www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/d...

I think this is the inverse of the "everything that is legal must be permitted" in all areas of life. We don't have to accept the frame that the only lines are legal ones. That is a frame that has been given to us by a host horrible people.

That's interesting to know! Yeah, I hadn't thought of it, but I never heard of him veering into crank cultures after it was rejected, which is something that happens a lot.

It depends on which period Crichton I guess; by the end he was saying climate change was a hoax and writing books to that effect based on the same principle of arrogant science, I agree early on it was more about the entrepreneurs of tech

I was infatuated with it in college for about six months in the 1980s like all good liberal arts weirdos at that time

Lol, out loud for real on that one

The series btw, Crichton just new how to sell books with the technology disaster plot; his point is always just the scientists say they have it under control and they don't

Rewatching westworld while doing some coding tasks. Just struck that this formed so many techies idea of AI, but the author doesn't really care about technology they care about a discredited 1976 account of the origin of human consciousness

I like that the picture is actually from the middle of the Obama administration. I'd like to go back there too!

It's honestly not the code that is unique, it's mostly just knowing what process to choose underneath, and people who want that can read my blog posts. The code nowadays is not really asset.

It will just die there except i'll get 5 emails a week from people who wonder if I could make this or that modification, or if I'd be interested in doing some free consulting on a startup they have. I've been down this road before.

Seriously I use this app once a day, and the pennies a search version is usually good enough.

This is the cheap to run version that runs directly on Gemini App Studio, I have a version on node that is much closer to flawless (but more expensive)

Arc is the one tool I've built I use all the time, when I've missed the relevance of a point of a show I'm watching or trying to find out who an actor in a show is. It really feels like someone should launch this as a product, but I don't have the time or capital.