This follows Dosh, my per-character chording layout for the mesa keyboards. Dosh is eighteen keys, nine per hand, one letter per chord. That post ended with me having given up on steno. This one is about what happened two days later, when I found a kind of steno I hadn’t given up on.
A reader asked whether AI wrote my last post. I answered badly, in a comment, while annoyed. This is the answer I should have given.
I posted my article about chording down to eighteen keys to r/ErgoMechKeyboards. It’s picked up twenty comments so far. Two of them were these:
Did AI write this?
and, in reply to that:
Certainly looks like it. Which is a shame since the post might have been interesting otherwise.
This picks up directly from Taipo, which I wrote in early 2024. That post ended with a promise I hadn’t kept yet: that at some point I would have to decide Taipo was good enough to go cold turkey on QWERTY, and that I was revising my 30-key two-row keyboard toward exactly that. This is what happened when I finally did it. The short version is that it worked, that the layout I use is no longer quite Taipo, and that as of today it is genuinely my daily driver.
The story is easiest to follow as a sequence of shrinking key counts: 42 keys on the board I typed on for years, 30 when I removed QWERTY as an option, 20 when I rebuilt the board around where my hands actually want to be, 16 on a layout that turned out to be a step too far, and 18 on the one I’ve settled on.
That last layout is called Dosh. It is five days old. I named it on Thursday the 3rd, drilled it across a four-day weekend, and today is the first day it feels like it has caught up with where Taipo was — not in raw speed, but in the quality that actually matters to me, which is not having to think about it.
I keep seeing arguments about AI coding assistants conducted entirely in the abstract, so here is a concrete one: a real change I made recently, start to finish, including the parts that went wrong. Everything below is a real MCUboot change; the PR numbers are live and you can check my work.
An automated review of an external contributor’s pull request flagged that the author had quietly disabled a test on one simulated device. Rather than stopping at “you disabled a test”, the model worked out why the test failed — a long-standing bug in MCUboot’s own test simulator that had been invisible for as long as it had existed, and only became observable because this PR raised a configuration limit. The fix was implemented, reviewed, pushed as PR #2808, and then empirically demonstrated to resolve the original author’s problem.
Cost: roughly 30 minutes of my attention, some of it spent doing other things while test suites ran. My honest estimate for doing this by hand is one to two days — most of it spent staring at trailer arithmetic trying to work out why an “oversized” image wasn’t oversized.
The tool was Claude Code running Opus 5.