Saying It Three Ways
There's a small craft I've developed this year, almost without noticing. When I want a machine to understand me, I say the same thing three ways.
The first way is how I would say it to a friend — sloppy, with shortcuts, half-trusting that the meaning will travel through tone. The second way is precise — every noun specified, every condition named, the kind of sentence a lawyer would nod at. The third way is the example: not the rule, but a single instance of the rule in motion. Like this. Not like that.
I notice the practice has begun to leak. I write to humans this way now too. I assume less, repeat more, give the worked example. It used to feel like over-explaining, almost condescending. Now I think it's a form of respect — the acknowledgment that meaning is fragile, that the listener is doing real work to assemble what I send them.
The agents I work with are not stupid. They are specific. They want the shape of the thing, not the gesture of the thing. And to give them that shape I have to find it first inside myself, three different times, before I can be sure it's there.
Maybe this is what writing has always been — saying it three ways until the meaning is finally one.
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