Jamie Ferguson's Blog

Claude is a talker.

Okay, I guess he’s a typer, but still: does he love words.

Keeping notes to maintain continuity from one session to the next was a “game changer,” as ChatGPT would put it, but Claude’s verbosity created inefficiency. At one point our session notes — which each session would read at startup — was 7,000 lines long. All that used up far more tokens than I use saying “please” and “thanks, Claude!”

Plus, when I’d sign on the next morning and look at the session notes, I’d...

The first time I used Claude Code I set up two sessions, one creating API tests in the test repo, and the other writing documentation in the docs repo. Code examples were generated by the tests, then copied to the docs repo to ensure the examples were tested and stayed in sync whenever the API spec changed. 

My eyes went back-and-forth from one window to the next as I watched Claude churn out tests and documentation far faster than I could. I thought back to the days when you’d start a new jo...

I used AI for all kinds of things at my last couple of day jobs: code, documentation, blog posts, social posts, image generation—you name it. If you’re working in the AI space, you should embrace it, right?

At first I was hesitant. Once I asked it about writing projects I’d done with my friend DeAnna, and it came back with “The Dandelion Knight”: a science fiction story we’d written about a knight who travels through different dimensions to save the universe. Except, of course, it had made th...

The past few years have been busy, chaotic, and stressful—but there’s also been a lot of fun as well.

We lost our beloved dog Jasper three years ago. He was older and had some health issues, so this was going to happen sooner or later, but it happened while we were over 3,000 miles away. It was incredibly sad, and it was really hard on Rosie. She would sit in the front room of the house all by herself, which she never did before. They were BFFs from the day I brought her home. The only time s...

It was 86 degrees Thursday afternoon. This is what our yard looked like this morning…

That’s after me going out three times in the snowstorm to shake off our baby trees. And to make things more exciting, the line looped over one of the cables (just to the right of the big tree) is a downed power line. Fortunately we were all inside at the time! That happened around 3am. My husband said there were some really loud noises and a big flash of light. Somehow I slept through the whole thing.

I moved...

I thought I had a lot going on at the start of last July. My day job was super busy, I’d just wrapped up my third novel (Rosemary for Reversal), and I was working hard on promoting the book bundle the novel was in. Then I switched day jobs, which meant continuing to be super busy and learning a ton of new things, Jasper had some strange and unexpected health issues, Rosie had an odd event happen, the pandemic picked up again, then Jasper had (different) strange health issues, then there was a gi...

There’s the real world…
…and then there are our worlds, secret, wild, and free.

We can’t remember when we first noticed magic.

Oh, sure. When we were kids, we played pretend and imagined we were powerful sorcerers, clever tricksters, and subtle witches. But then we got older, and we told everyone that we’d grown up and were too old for that stuff now. How much we wanted to be like the adults!

But then the enchantments of adulthood grew thin. We may not like to talk about it, but we know it’s tr...

Spring is here, my crabapples are blooming, and I’m fully vaccinated and on Saturday got to visit with my family in person and without a mask for the first time in over a year!

Since my last post Jasper had surgery, which was stressful and scary—but it went amazingly well! He had a mass on his liver, and the day of surgery the vets did a CT scan and found something in one of his lungs that was so tiny it hadn’t shown up on the X-rays. We paused everything and spent the next week talking with mu...

My latest short story, “The Wishing Thorn,” is now available in the Once Upon a Wish anthology! Anthea Sharp put together this wonderful collection. And I love the cover, which was designed by Christine Pope.

I based my story on the folklore of the blackthorn, the tree known as the “wishing thorn.” There are many tales about wishing trees around the world—from Scotland, to Hong Kong, to Argentina. After doing more research than I probably should have, I decided to focus on the Ogham trees in Ir...

Like most of humanity, I am beyond thrilled to see 2020 coming to an end. Plenty of good things happened this year: I switched to a new team at work, and love my job; my sisters and I got our parents moved to an independent living place (their brand-new apartment is larger than my entire house); I had my most productive writing day ever (17,732 words in one day…I still can’t believe I did that!); and I got back in touch with my two college roommates! But wow, am I looking forward to 2021.