meaningfool

Activity Log - 2025-09-12

Activity Log - 2025-09-12

  • /daily command improvements

    • Tags: personal operating system
    • Problems:
      • The command prompt contained a number of lines of bash code making it hard to understand and maintain
      • Claude Code would repeatedly ask for permissions slowing down / interrupting the process
    • Learnings:
      • Coding principle apply to the “harness” as well. Splitting the responsibilities, testing… Although they are “simpler” tools, Claude Code still tends to create complex / brittle code
      • Permissions can be set at multiple levels and for files. Claude Code muddied the settings.json with permissions for whole bash scripts instead of files. Cleanup task + policy to come up with (backlog)
      • Discovered slash commands cannot bypass AI processing even with ! prefix. Claude will “think” whatever is in there. Creating an incompressible delay
    • Results:
      • The daily activity logs generated don’t match my expectations. Claude Code does not manage to group things logically and reverse engineer the intent.

  • AI orchestration infrastructure:

    • Tags: personal operating system
    • Analysis:
      • “Garbage in, garbage out”: daily activity logs are bad because I don’t have the structure and discipline to properly identify and log the problems I’m tackling, nor the research and decisions happening along the way. My commits reflect that I’m doing all at once.
      • If I want to be able to generate better daily logs, I need to encapsulate the work and record my intent explictly.
      • This is somewhat frustrating as all the information I need is already present (implictly) in my conversations with Claude Code. I started from the expectation that a powerful assistant would be able to draw from that. But I did not give access to the conversations yet (unclear how to provide that). And I would have the problem that conversations are not aligned on commits and on issues.
      • So I had the (for now) misguided expectation that AI would be able to process my messy communications and coding manners, but realized that the GIGO principle still applies.
    • Approach:
      • Create proper “issues” (I never clicked with the rigidity of US / epics 2-levels hierarchy) in “issues.md”
      • When issues get closed, they are moved to the devlog + enriched in technical details
    • Conclusion
      • Finding myself recreating all the backlog management features (create / close issues) in a system that is not very reactive (slash commands take at least 5 sec)
      • Not the right approach: I know some CLI tools provide that kind of capabilities if that’s where I want to go

Thoughts

  • Only automate what you know how to do:
    • I started by automating my daily activity generation without doing it manually before
    • I can tell what a bad output is (when presented with a result, I know what I don’t like about it)
    • But I can’t describe what a good output is
    • So before “fixing my dev process” hoping it will be enough to fix my daily activity generation, I’m going to start by writing those activity logs manually, and use /daily as helper / starter to do so that I can improve to the point of complete automation if possible
    • I’m going nonetheless to try and adopt better coding practice with better compartementalization and better use of commits, branches and other git features that can help make things more organized