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Dispatches

Short posts from practice: what I’m running, what broke, what I’d change when the stack shifts again. Each dispatch is a dated snapshot—useful this week, still legible after the next release.

Dispatch
Desktop Athan Dial

AI research that actually cites sources

A fake citation in a product brief forced the switch: parallel pulls from PubMed, preprints, and trials, then tables with DOIs I can open before I repeat a number.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Code Athan Dial

Autonomous agents need a foreman

I learned the hard way that one-shot multi-phase Claude Code returns fast code and expensive cleanup; discuss → plan → execute → verify with atomic commits is what made autonomy survivable for me.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Desktop Athan Dial

Cowork changed how I think about AI

I stopped paying the preamble tax once Claude sat beside the doc or thread—short questions, faster triage; I still reach for Claude Code for files, commands, and APIs.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Code Athan Dial

Delegation is the real skill

I filed a vague `/codex-task` on a Friday and spent Monday unwinding five conflicting guesses; the real bottleneck is always the same—context, legible scope, and explicit format—so a new teammate could ship without guessing.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Code Athan Dial

Memory across sessions

I stopped burning every session opener on the same policy paragraph once `/remember`, `/reflect`, and the knowledge hub gave me one collaborator that already held decisions, guardrails, and corrections.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Desktop Athan Dial

Read-only automation is a feature

I keep automations in draft: Claude proposes, I send—parallel drafts for speed, human gate for tail risk after a near-miss taught me the cost of auto-send.
· 2 min read
Dispatch
Code Athan Dial

Skills encode what you learned the hard way

Every skill I write holds the constraint I burned time discovering — the CLI flag that silently fails, the join pattern that actually works, the config the docs forgot to mention.
· 2 min read