Tips
Tip no. 7 Teach your agent to write better
Text output from LLMs doesn’t have a good reputation. It’s too long, hard to follow, and uses the wrong words or tone. That’s why I think it still holds that text meant for another person is better written by hand.
Still, the cases where we have to read something generated by agents will probably keep growing. So how do we make the text output better? First, upgrade an old model. Opus 5.5, for example, is miles better than Opus 5.
I often use a skill inspired by a tool for spotting odd AI clichés: https://tools.simonwillison.net/llm-cliche-highlighter I built a script for it that checks some of the principles deterministically too, e.g. the distribution of sentence lengths.
Another skill I have is trained on what I wrote myself. I use it when it annoys me how formal some text is.
And finally, when the agent’s answer is just needlessly long, I use the /tldr skill, which says: “Write it in 3 points at most”, and quite often that’s enough.
You can find the skills mentioned above in my marketplace: https://github.com/lttr/claude-marketplace/blob/master/plugins/writing/README.md
Blog posts
- AI on the comand line
Using AI tools on the command line leverages the elegance of UNIX utilities. The power of these programs lies in composability—each program has a specific focus, and you can chain the output of one as input to another.
- The chef's table
An opportunity is an interesting thing. An opportunity has potential that may or may not be realised. And does it have a price? And a value?
- UnJS libraries are growing
This week I had the opportunity to attend FrontKon, a conference in the Czech Republic for frontend developers and designers. I gave a short talk about UnJS, a growing set of libraries designed to simplify the creation of new frameworks and tools.
- Making sense of Web features
There is a huge amount of features on the web. The Browser Compatibility Data project lists more than 14000 of them! How to make sense of it all?
- Committing to writing
I have been struggling to write regularly for quite some time. I wanted to write more, publish blog posts and I'm even dreaming of writing a book in the future.
- Working with correct versions of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem
The ideal is to have the desired version of every tool at every situation during both development and deployment. Docker might be the answer for someone, but it might not be practical to use it all the time. Let's analyze the situation.