Did I even write that last post?
For those of you who'd rather read the input tokens than the output tokens, here's the prompt behind the last post.
You’re right, I didn’t write it. Claude did. But in transparency, and for those of you who’d rather read the input tokens than the output tokens (Dex, I’m looking in your direction), here’s the prompt I used to create that post:
OK so I want to write a blog post for the personal site and um I’ve kind of been marinating on this feeling for like a week now and I’m not sure it’s a post yet but let me just talk it through and you tell me if there’s something here, so like literally an hour ago I was walking Soup and I had a Claude Code session running on my laptop and I had headphones in and halfway down the hill the approval prompt comes through and I’m like tapping yes on my phone while Soup is peeing on something, like that’s the level we’re at now, and by the time we got back the agent had refactored a service and opened a PR and it’s just sitting there waiting on me for the next thing, and I thought, this is the dream right, this is the founder dream of leverage finally arriving, GPUs humming, Opus fully capable, infinite leverage, but I feel the opposite of the dream, I feel further behind than ever and I want to write about why, OK um so the more I sit with it the more I think it’s that there’s this new background process running in my head, kind of like a daemon, oh that’s a good joke, footnote, the technical term is rumination but you say demon I say daemon, definitely use that, and the daemon is like, Ben, the GPUs are sitting right there, Opus is fully capable, the only thing in the way is you coming up with the next idea fast enough, and so if I’m not prompting I’m wasting it, and if I run out of ideas it’s like well you should have more ideas, what’s wrong with you that you don’t have more ideas, and honestly that line, what’s wrong with me that I don’t have more ideas, that should be a pull quote, that’s the question I keep asking myself, OK so I want to break it down into the components of the feeling, some of it is FOMO, every prompt I don’t run is a thing that won’t exist in the world, some of it is guilt, the friction is gone the tools are cheap and I’m still not shipping fast enough, but the main one is anxiety, like imagination is the bottleneck and the bottleneck is now me, OK and I want to be clear that this is so much more than code for me, like everyone right now is writing the coding agent version of this story, but for me Claude Code is, sure I use it to ship SuperDuper features but I’m also using it for the bar mitzvah speech I’m rewriting and the personalized weather app I built for my Pixel watch and that elaborate prank I’m running on the kids involving Gabi’s Wordle streak and the redesign of my blog and hacking my irrigation system, like every part of my life that used to have a sign saying NOT TODAY BEN, the sign has been taken down, you know, OK and you should put the domain names bit in here because it’s funny and it’s very me, like every nerd buys domain names for every cool idea on the theory that one day you’ll have a free weekend, my favorite is investiv.us, .us, like investive us, personal finance for the rest of us, do a parenthetical that yes that’s a Seinfeld reference from the nineties in case you were wondering how long I’ve been squatting domains hoping for a free weekend, and every year these come up for renewal and I say yes this is the year, narrator voice, it wasn’t, do the narrator parenthetical thing I do, OK so the bigger point I’m getting to is that the scarce resource to building has always been capacity, time skill the money to hire someone with the skill the bandwidth after work and kids and the dog, and the gap between what I wanted to do and what I could do was actually comfortable, like the unbuilt things stayed unbuilt and I didn’t feel bad about it because they were never realistically possible, pull quote that one too, but now, compute is cheap and agents are capable so my creativity is the expensive scarce resource, my imagination is the bottleneck, OK and I always like to look to history with these things, what’s the analog, and the best one I’ve come up with is personal finance, every dollar not invested is a dollar not compounding, it’s the guilt of cash sitting in your checking account when you could deploy it with a few clicks, the loss is invisible because it’s counterfactual, that’s a pull quote also, and so every prompt I don’t run is a counterfactual product, a counterfactual essay, a counterfactual better bar mitzvah speech, a counterfactual prank on Gabi, the graveyard of unbuilt things is growing every day, OK and the other historical analog and I think it might be the better one, wait no, I’ll do both, is industrial engineering, the early 20th century guys were obsessed with utilization rates, a stopped assembly line is burning money, just-in-time, three-shift operations, lights-out manufacturing, a hundred years of management theory dedicated to making sure the expensive constrained resource never idled, that’s how I feel about myself right now, but the punchline is the industrial engineers eventually figured out that running a constraint at 100% utilization produces worse output not better, like the whole Toyota Production System, queueing theory, ops research from like 1960 onward all converged on the same conclusion, systems produce more useful output when they have slack, pull quote, so if I’m the constraint and I am, then running myself at 100% is a failure mode, the dog walk isn’t time stolen from the GPUs, it’s the slack that lets the next prompt be a good prompt instead of just a prompt, shower thoughts happen in the shower for a reason there’s no keyboard in there, and one more beat, I’m always berating my team when they log in during vacation, take the vacation we gave you the time off for a reason, I need to take my own advice, and end it with this, I’m writing this on a Friday evening, there’s a Claude Code session in another window waiting for me, I’m going to close the laptop before dinner, Anthropic’s TPUs will be fine without me, they have other people to serve, my graveyard gets a few more unbuilt things and I need to become okay with that because the alternative, me at 100% utilization generating a steady stream of mediocre prompts because I’m afraid of silence and FOMO, that produces worse outcomes and a worse life, oh and footnote, narrator voice, he didn’t actually close the laptop, that’s funny that’s me, and uh actually Soup literally just peed on the floor while I was thinking about this so put that as the actual last line, like, Also, Soup just peed on the floor while I was writing this post, three categories, personal AI creativity, match the voice of the recent stuff, you know the rules, no fake Tuesday morning vignettes, no it’s not X it’s Y, easy on the em-dashes
You complain about reading AI slop and LLM-generated posts. So which did you prefer? My prompt or what Claude generated? Be honest.
I'm Ben Stein, co-founder and CEO of SuperDuper, helping underwater parents manage all their family logistics. I live in Oakland with my Keeper wife Arin, our two overprogrammed teenage boys, and a dog named Soup who contributes nothing helpful to the family logistics and arguably makes them harder, but he's really cute.
If you want to follow along: superduperlabs.com · benjaminste.in · LinkedIn · Substack