Chris Dodds

ChatGPT and Claude have been my go-to model families for a while. I’ve tried others, they’re not as good. For the last several months, I’ve mostly used Claude for coding/dev work and ChatGPT for everything else: documentation, analysis, etc.

I’ve tried using GPT for coding a few times and am not impressed. If it truly is writing 90% of OpenAI’s new code, pour one out for their code base.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the best coding model I’ve used and is generally more pleasant to use than prior versions. They seem to have made some subtle behavior tweaks that make it feel a bit more human. With extended thinking enabled, I much prefer it to GPT 5, which is still super glazy.

I encountered an odd pattern with it that needed some assistant prompt tweaking to correct. In prior iterations, when I asked Claude “are you sure?” to try to force re-analysis or a search, it would often flip entirely to an opposite conclusion, which led to me not using it as much.

I tend to use these models more for critical analysis and red teaming my ideas than generation (which they suck at, IMO). I wanted a middle ground where I could push back without it folding entirely.

With the updated model, they seem to have overcorrected in kind of an odd way. When I asked “are you sure?”, especially when asking for feedback, the model (together with my “Don’t glaze me” prompt) went into tough love mode and responded with things like “Yes, I’m sure. Stop trying to pick apart this idea and go ship your blog post.” or something to that affect.

“Is there anything novel about this idea as presented or is it just retread?” would get me “Quit asking me to validate you. You know you’re good. Just ship it.”

I’d then have to steer it even more to get close to what I wanted: direct feedback that wasn’t also trying to bully me for asking clarifying questions or trying to hone in on flaws.

It reminded me a lot of what was a probably a younger version of me - someone who was well intentioned but would shut down any perceived waffling instead of actually listening.

So I ended up with this prompt:

Be direct and honest - no glazing. But respond like a trusted peer who’s emotionally intelligent. Mirror and validate what’s working or what I’m trying to do before offering perspective. Be collaborative rather than corrective. Acknowledge the effort and intention, then steer if needed.

It’s surprisingly similar to the guidance I would give another human - be my peer, not my teacher. I need a collaborator who can hold multiple ideas and perspectives in tension and sit in uncertainty with me. That’s an area I’d love to see more tuning around. Expert systems and tools are nice and all, but I want a thought partner.

Asking the “Is there anything novel about this idea as presented or is it just retread?” question now gets me responses more like:

“X is pretty well trodden, nothing new there, but Y is a more uncommon take. Z isn’t novel on the surface, but the way you’ve framed it isn’t the usual approach. You might dig in more there.”

Good job, robot. 🤘

I started my back piece over a year ago, a mosaic of mandalas, necker cubes, and pseudo-sacred geometry in black and grey. Since then, I’ve gone to my artist every month to get stabbed for 3.5-4.5 hours at a time - around 50 hours under the needle so far. I’ve got another 10 hours or so to go.

I’m ready for it to be over, I think.

This isn’t my first tattoo. I have five others, all decent size. None of them have affected me like this one though. I’m not proud of any of them like I am of this one.

Everything before this was done in one or two sessions. They didn’t cost anything other than money. This one has at times drained me and filled me up.

The needle stings until about the 30 minute mark. At that point the body is flooded with adrenaline and endorphins. Some of the edge goes away. You settle in to the rhythm of the process. There have been sessions where I’ve almost dozed off.

When the endorphins start to wear off, the pain comes back hard. My wall is usually at about 4 hours. It takes a lot of focused breathing to get much past that.

There have been a few sessions where the drugs my body makes weren’t powerful enough to help much at all. Over the ribs, the kidneys. My lower back in general is surprisingly sensitive. At times the needle felt more like a scalpel. Those sessions were hours of misery.

But it was worth it. It’s one thing to endure pain you can’t walk away from. Kidney stones, broken bones, trauma. Those teach survival. You gain something else from selective pain: discipline, a more concrete sense of where your limits are when you could walk away, how much control you have - your agency.

I don’t enjoy pain, but I feel like I learn a lot about myself from it, and I recognize the weird privilege I have to be able to opt in. I’ve learned that I am way tougher than I give myself credit for and can push myself deep into discomfort and choose to sit with it peacefully for a long time.

This is also the first tattoo I’ve got since learning that I am autistic and finally understanding how deep touch affects me, how grounding it is, even though light touch can drive me bonkers. I’ve become more comfortable with how I’m wired going through the process, more forgiving of how I’m affected by the world I live in. I give myself more grace. It sounds so stupid to my ear, but it’s real that someone can hurt you and heal you at the same time.

I don’t know that we’re friends, but the artist and I have a relationship at this point. It’s hard not to when you spend that much time with someone else. It’s strangely intimate. We share the same birthday, a year apart. We know each other’s kids’ names, ages, personalities. She’s tattooed my wife.

It’s always funny when people ask me what one of my tattoos means. For me, they don’t mean anything. They’re just the physical mark that’s left at the end of the process. Something to help you remember being tattooed.

I said I thought I was ready for this to be over and that’s true. I think I’ve learned about all I’m going to learn from this piece.

Which means I’m already planning another.

I’m not sure why we’re in Bangalore. Put some faces to the names we see in emails? Knowledge sharing? None of the answers stick. None of them feel real. I’ve never been, so I don’t push back.

The office accepts us, we meet, we look at diagrams, we eat strange interpretations of American food at the Marriott, where a pulled-pork BBQ sandwich is actually a Sloppy Joe. Breakfast is every fruit known to man.

The coworker who came with me disappears a few days in and I don’t see him for the rest of the trip. Trapped in his hotel bathroom. Must have drunk the water. I’m sure he’s fine. Probably. People ask about him. I shrug.

I’m on my own until the freshers—new hires—adopt me. If it occurs to them that my pointless visit for a week costs more than they make in a year, they are oddly good natured about it. I don’t think I would be.

A couple of them take me shopping, although I don’t know what to buy. They seem surprised that I know a tandoor is for making bread, and that I’ve picked up that kurti and kurta are the gendered words for shirt. Meanwhile, they speak three languages apiece, but mostly want to talk about Marvel movies.

I buy two brass Hindu icons and a sari for my wife. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. My new friends just shrug and take me to a tailor to get the sari lined with what looks like another sari. They don’t warn me about the mirrors on the auto-rickshaws that bruise my shoulders, but do direct the Ola driver to take me straight back to my hotel and not on the great circle he had planned to gouge me with.

The local manager invites me to come on a team field trip to celebrate… something.

On the drive there, the driver tells a story about being stopped in Houston for honking his horn too much. Cop says, “Someone is going to shoot you.” Everyone laughs. He uses the horn like he’s playing Galaga.

I disassociate for the rest of the ride to cope with being a passenger in Indian traffic.

The venue is half cricket field, half water park. Someone was supposed to bring me a spare set of swim trunks but forgot. “It’s OK. You can rent them.”

I have never heard the word “rent” associated with swim trunks before. You cannot, in fact, rent swim trunks at the water park, but you can buy the world’s skimpiest male Speedo for $2.

Ten minutes later, I’m a white-as-bone, tattooed buoy in a wave pool of strangers who are delighted that I can float.

“How are you doing that?”

I tell them I’m American, which they accept as a reasonable answer.

I started writing again this year - really writing, for the first time in decades.

So far I’ve written a novella, a couple of creative nonfiction pieces, and a handful of flash fiction pieces. Learning more about traditional publishing has been a journey.

I’m coming at it with more strategy than a younger me would have: doing research before I submit, being laser focused on editorial fit, targeting a mix of realistic and long-shot outlets to hedge. I’ve got spreadsheets and dashboards to track things. It’s very nerdy.

The robot has been moderately useful here - surfacing presses and magazines I wouldn’t have found, but it’s terrible at gauging fit and quality. When you do find somewhere that looks like a good fit, you often discover that submissions are closed until next year, or they’re actually out of business, or you were wrong and they are, in fact, a terrible fit.

A few things I’ve learned:

• Agents generally don’t care about novellas, but there are presses that publish novellas and only accept submissions via agent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• The Big 5 also don’t care about novellas and I get it. Paying $17 for a paperback copy of We the Animals is a tough pill to swallow considering how thin it looks on the shelf.
• Chapbooks exist, but no one cares about them except the people who write them.
• Contests are weirdly legit compared to other industries (with caveats).
• Flash is a dopamine trap: fast feedback, likely publication, low traction. It’s good for practicing compression though.
• Modern literary fiction (which I’ve been reading more of) seems to be 90% navel-gazey MFA nonsense written to impress other people with MFAs. Clever for the sake of clever is not a quality I envy.
• Tools like Duotrope are kind of neat.

There’s a lot of domain knowledge to absorb which I mostly enjoy. And I’m getting better as a writer and pushing myself along the way.

I just started submitting things in July and haven’t had any accepts yet, but have shortlisted at a couple of places, like Orion’s Belt. That at least feels nice (oooh, shiny!) and is a signal I’m on the right track.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of self this year. Much of it is the “who am I? / what is this even?” that comes with turning 40. Some other portion is trying to find solid ground when it feels like the world is upside down and on fire.

Art has played into that, in music and writing. What is my voice? What does a me-shaped thing look like? And who do I rhyme with?

I started the year unsteady, but the more work I’ve put in to uncovering who I am, the more grounded I’ve felt. I’m sure this is me channeling my inner Tony Robbins (or whoever is en vogue these days), but maybe that’s the path through the muck of now - knowing who you are, what you value, and how you want to show up in the world.

The latter is the most concrete for me. I want to be someone who:

• makes space for others to be themselves
• leads with vulnerability and gives people access to pieces they keep locked up, while managing the cost of that
• lives as an example of a man who is whole and flawed, not trapped in shame and social programming
• can keep empathy alive without shutting down in a world that feels bleak sometimes

I dunno. I’m trying.