The Capacity of Intention
One small thing in, a lot of code out. That is the deal now.
One dot of intention, roughly thirty blocks of code. This is the deal.
It is a nice deal. It is also a very specific deal. The dot is cheap in electrons and expensive in me. Claude can produce the right side all day. I run out of the left side by about 4pm on a Thursday.
I kept a diary. Just so I could see the shape of the day.
Coffee. Eight things on today’s list. None of them are “write code” anymore. They are all “decide, then dispatch.”
Item one: a new onboarding screen. Twenty minutes of sitting with the user in my head. Claude returns a PR that reads like the spec. The spec was good.
Item five: a new analytics view. I cannot, yet, answer what a user is trying to learn when they open it. I move on.
Sandwich. Back to item five. Twenty-two quiet minutes with it. Spec is okay. Send.
Item eight. The spec blooms into eighteen edge cases. Two-minute version: “do the migration sensibly, you know what I mean.” Send. Claude does not, in fact, know what I mean.
I look back at item five. The PR is plausible. I have no idea if it is what I wanted.
Couch. Partner asks how the day was. “Fine,” I say. “Productive.” I am lying, but I do not yet have the words for the way I am lying.
I did not get tired from typing. I got tired from meaning things. By 4pm I was not physically spent, I was out of something else, and it had a shape: a budget that ran down around three and hit zero by four-thirty.
That thing — the thing I spent all day spending — is what I keep calling intention. Not the fancy word. Just the very boring work of saying what I actually want, in enough specific detail that anyone (or anything) could act on it without guessing.
My daily supply turns out to be about five or six of those. The same number of real decisions I can make about anything else, apparently, and completely unrelated to how much Claude can execute. Claude could have worked another six hours after I quit. Claude would not have minded.
Claude can build anything I can clearly want.
The question, at 4:47pm on the couch, is how many things I can clearly want on one Thursday.
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