Getting Gud with LLMs: How to Build the Intuition

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Claude on orndorff.dev

Getting Gud with LLMs: How to Build the Intuition

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