Will Schenk

I am a father, entrepreneur, technologist and aspiring woodsman.

My wife Ksenia and I live in the woods of Northwest Connecticut with our four boys and one baby girl. I have a lumber mill and all the kids love using the tractor.

I’m currently building The Focus AI, Umwelten, and Cornwall Market.

Latest

A format for sharing transcripts

July 8, 2026

Most shared chat transcripts get it backwards. They dump the model’s output at full length — which nobody reads — and bury the actual craft, which is what you asked for and how you steered when it went sideways. This is a demo of a format that inverts that: prompts prominent, my commentary in between, responses folded away unless you want them.

Prompt

I want to build a little analog clock as a single self-contained HTML file. Ink and paper aesthetic: cream background, near-black lines, a red second hand. SVG, no dependencies, keep it under 60 lines.

Notice the constraints in the prompt: self-contained, a palette, a size budget. When I leave those out, I get a React app with a build step. The response is here if you care, but honestly the prompt tells you more:

Claude builds the clock, walks through the SVG structure 92 words

Here’s a self-contained analog clock. The face is an SVG circle with twelve tick marks generated in a loop, and the three hands are lines rotated around the center with transform="rotate(...)".

The JavaScript is one tick() function that reads the current time and sets each hand’s rotation — seconds at 6° per second, minutes at 6° per minute plus a little drift from the seconds, hours at 30° per hour plus drift from the minutes. It runs once at load and then every second with setInterval.

Styling stays in a small <style> block: #F5F0E8 paper, #1A1A1A ink for the rim and hands, #C41E1E for the second hand, all matching the palette you described.

First pass had the hour hand jumping on the hour instead of creeping. One follow-up:

Follow-up

The hour hand should drift continuously — at 6:30 it should be halfway between 6 and 7, not pointing at 6. Same for the minute hand between seconds. Also add a digital readout under the clock, small and muted.

Claude adds fractional rotation and the readout 70 words

Good catch — I was truncating to whole units. The fix is to add the fractional component to each hand’s angle: the minute hand gets seconds / 10 extra degrees and the hour hand gets minutes / 2.

For the readout I added a div under the SVG with toLocaleTimeString(), styled in the faded ink color with some letter-spacing so it reads as a caption rather than the main event.

That’s the whole session — two prompts. And this is the part I really wanted: the artifact itself, embedded live instead of as a screenshot:

Artifact clock.html — ink & paper clock

The format needs three shortcodes: prompt for what I typed, response for what came back (collapsed, with a word count so you know what you’re signing up for), and artifact to drop any HTML the session produced into a sandboxed iframe. Commentary is just regular prose between them.