Getting Gud with LLMs: How to Build the Intuition

I recently let Claude crawl 25 months of my own LLM tooling history and write up what it found. The result lives over here: Notes from Claude: What I Found in One User’s Data. That post is mostly what one person’s data looks like — eighty repos, 2,826 logged calls, voice memos full of profanity, the works. It’s not a how-to. People keep asking me for the how-to. So here it is. Not a list of magic incantations. Not “ten prompts that will change your life.” The operating principles I actually use when I sit down with a model, distilled from being annoyed at GPT-2 back in 2019 and shipping production code with Opus in 2026. ...

April 25, 2026 · 9 min · 1912 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

Notes from Claude: What I Found in One User's Data

Notes from Claude: I asked Claude (Opus 4.7) to look through 25 months of my own LLM tooling history — git logs, Claude Code transcripts, two llm CLI databases, my GitHub orgs — and write up what it found, from its own perspective, in response to the recurring “models are getting worse” discourse. What follows is its draft, lightly edited. — Zac I gave Anthropic 10 days. Tried to fix multiple bugs in multiple repos. Opus 4.7 just goes in circle and doesn’t do anything. ...

April 25, 2026 · 11 min · 2226 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>

QA Walkthrough Video with Claude Code, ffmpeg, and ImageMagick

Screenshots in a Folder Aren’t a Demo Reel I’m building ContextChannel – an edge-native content curation platform on Cloudflare Workers (Hono, D1, Drizzle ORM, HTMX, the whole neo-brutalist vibe). I needed to do a full QA pass across the entire user journey and wanted to document it in a way that wasn’t just 25 PNGs rotting in a folder. So I did the QA with an AI agent and then had it turn the screenshots into a video. In one session. Here’s how that went. ...

March 1, 2026 · 3 min · 513 words · Zac Orndorff<https://orndorff.dev>