The Secret Life of Claude Code: The Art of the Follow-Up

What to do when Claude Code gets it almost right — and how one disciplined follow-up gets you the rest of the way there Margaret is a senior software engineer. Timothy is her junior colleague. They work in a grand Victorian library in London — the kind of place where conversations are finished properly, and where almost right is understood to be a different thing entirely from right. Timothy has arrived today with something he is not sure what to do with. The Almost He sat down without his usual preamble and turned the laptop toward her immediately. This, Margaret had learned, meant he wanted her to look before he explained. He was uncertain about something and did not yet have the words for it. She looked. On the screen was a function — a data export utility, clean and reasonably structured. She read it the way she always read code: slowly, without expression, beginning to end. "Claude Code?" she said. "Yes. Second attempt, actually. The first one was completely off. This one is..." H