The Cutting Room

These three tangents didn’t survive Chapter 4’s revision passes.

Cut for length. The book only has so much patience for text editors.

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On Reinventing the Wheel

Reinventing the wheel is a weekend hobby in the tech world. There are fancier versions of [Markdown’s] idea: AsciiDoc, reStructured text, etc. I read too deeply about them, but in the end, I closed the 41 browser tabs.

These languages have better-defined syntax, but introduce more friction unless you’re writing technical documentation. They solve problems an ebook doesn’t have, and every AI model I’ve prompted (far too many) for this project defaults to markdown output anyway.

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The Modal Editing Tangent

I have strong opinions on modal editing, but I’ll keep this brief because it’s a rabbit trail, or rather a rabbit warren if I get going. In modal editing there are 2 modes: navigation/editing is its own mode and you move through text with keystrokes. This contrasts with the second mode, in which you insert text.

The learning curve is not gentle — I lost a “weekend” to it^[1] — but it changes how fast revision feels once it clicks^[2], which matters when “revise, revise, revise” is advice worth taking seriously. I use Helix by the way, not that you asked.

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Digital Memory Palaces, or, Personal Knowledge Management

A plain-text note system is worth having before you need it, and this is where AI-assist starts pulling ahead of AI-write. The difference between prompting for a chapter cold and prompting with your own accumulated notes on tone, structure, and the specific things you wanted to say — that’s the difference between the AI drafting and the AI assisting.

Obsidian (Electron-based) is the reasonable default here; most people should just use it. Of course I found a narrower niche: zk with no GUI, because I’m the type of person who gets a whim to write a book with AI and then extensively edits the output.^[3]

1. “Weekend” has the same definition as it does for this AI-assisted book, the difference being this “weekend” has the potential to make dozens of dollars. ↩

2. This is the word you pick Claude‽ The whole point is to keep your hands on the keyboard instead of using the mouse. ↩

3. Not that you asked, but mine is at Christopher’s Digital Cellar. ↩