I’m not a programmer — Claude writes all the code here, and I’ve ended up using it for most knowledge-work too. The honest shape of that, from its own logs.
The ramp
Messages to Claude per month, 2026† month in progress
January was 62 messages of poking at it. The April jump is when I stopped asking questions and started handing over whole jobs — a goal and a done-condition instead of a prompt
June was 54,460 messages and ~16,000 tool calls
The setup
Skills — 140 installed skills and slash-commands: /money answers questions from my actual bank feeds, /inbox triages my messages, /grok prints quiz chits, /voice drafts things in my voice from a pack mined off my real sent email (it was used on this very page, with mixed first results 😅)
Memory — 186 small files of accumulated corrections and context. The rule I’m going for: never have to say the same thing twice
Hooks — code that runs around Claude: a session-start hook injects my formatting rules into every conversation, and a finished job pings a notification that deep-links back to the right terminal tab
The Freedom hook — killing my app blocker (which I do a lot) now triggers a mandatory 5-minute chimed pause before the command actually runs. Claude enforces a sit before I can doomscroll, which is uh, rather effective
Subagents — 1331 delegated tasks in the last 30 days. The audit behind this page was five of them sweeping the machine in parallel while a sixth checked their work
MCP — Claude can see my calendar (three Google accounts), time tracking, messages, workout log, and browser. ‘Can you check…’ is a complete instruction now
Talking to it
A lot of input is dictated, often on walks. The recipe I’ve landed on for a good brain-dump: outcome / done-when / your call / don’t touch / come back
Missing slots get filled with stated assumptions rather than clarifying questions, which is the difference between a 60-second reply and 10+ minutes of finished work
Photo: the ramble recipe card
Before all this
There’s a fossil record: for an executive-assistant application in 2025 I made a deck with a ‘productivity stack’ slide — Toggl, a text expander, Maccy, TextSniper, Freedom, Intend, Beeminder, Anki, Miro, Alfred, an early dictation tool
Good tools, but each one was something I operated by hand. Half of them are still here (Freedom, Anki, Obsidian, the dictation habit) — the difference now is the layer that operates things for me
Photo/embed: the ‘productivity stack’ slide from that deck