Context Monkey

Some days I feel like Claude’s context monkey. I feed him the docs, the tickets, the links to the things that matter. I pick out the three snippets he needs to see and paste them into the prompt in the order he prefers. I notice when he’s getting confused and I re-seed the context. I apologize to myself when I forget to include the thing he would have needed.

Most of the time this feels like just how the tool works. Some of the time it feels like I’m the tool, and I’m helping train him on how to push me out of the loop.

I don’t actually think I’m training my own replacement. That framing is dramatic in a way that isn’t useful. What I think is that the shape of my work has shifted, and I haven’t fully sat with what it means. A year ago I was the person who wrote the PRD. Now I’m the person who picks what Claude should know in order to write a PRD good enough for me to edit. The editing is real work. The picking is real work. The writing has moved, and some of the pride I used to take in the writing hasn’t relocated yet.

I’ve caught myself missing the writing. Not because Claude’s drafts are worse. They’re usually better than my first pass. It’s because the writing was where I used to figure out what I actually thought. When the draft shows up in five minutes, that figuring-out step shortens, and I sometimes ship an opinion I haven’t really felt yet.

The work I’m doing instead is shaped like maintenance. I write golden principles documents. I edit a domains file so the next session inherits the right framing of our product. I notice the fifth correction in a row and turn it into a skill that lands in my dotfiles repo and ships to every new session I open. I’m not writing the things. I’m tuning the system that writes the things.

That’s a different job than the one I trained for. I’m not sure yet if I’m better at it or worse at it. I am sure I haven’t fully made peace with the change.

The anxiety is real. Every month another piece of the craft I used to feel skilled at becomes something a model does faster than me. I don’t have a clean answer yet. The parts of the job I love most are still there. Judgment calls. Working with people. Taking responsibility for a decision. Driving where the team goes. Those don’t get cheaper. But they don’t always “feel” like work to me. They feel like the byproducts of the work I had to do to earn my way to them. PRDs, synthesis, customer research, roadmap plans. Claude does most of that now. The favorite parts are still there. The climb that earned them isn’t.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. “Context monkey” is funny and it’s also accurate, and holding both of those at once feels more like my actual job than pretending I’ve figured this out would.