Attention Span

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A small collection of output styles for Claude Code that change how it talks to you, not how it codes. Answer-first, plain English, easy to skim. Each one is a single markdown file you drop in and switch on.

The concise-by-default rules are kind to your attention first. Trimming Claude's output is a welcome side effect, not the point.

Three so far: Attention-kind (the flagship), Spartan (terse, zero warmth), and Rundown (TL;DR briefings). Each has its own section below.

Attention-kind

An ADHD-friendly style. Claude answers first, keeps it short, drops the jargon, and expands only on what's actually worth your attention. Every point is spaced out and marked with a →, and the important words are bold, so you can skim just the bold and still get the whole answer.

Same engineering ability underneath. Only the delivery changes.

Who it's for: anyone whose attention is a limited resource. ADHD, tired, deep in flow, or just done with walls of text.

Before / after

The question: "Which database should I use for a new social app, PostgreSQL or MongoDB?" Same answer, before and after the style.

For a new social app, start with PostgreSQL, and the bar for choosing MongoDB instead is high. Social apps are relationship-heavy by nature: users follow users, posts belong to users, comments belong to posts, likes connect users to posts. That's a web of connections, exactly what a relational database is built for. In MongoDB you either cram related data into one record and fight size limits, or split it out and end up stitching it back together in your app code anyway. The feed problem makes this worse: timelines, "posts from people you follow," and mutual-friend lookups all lean on the kind of cross-referencing Postgres does in a single query. You also get consistency for free, since follow counts and "did I already like this" checks want real transactions… [and it keeps going like this]

→ Use PostgreSQL. A social app is all relationships (friends, follows, likes), and Postgres handles those natively. Right for ~90% of new social apps.

→ You keep flexibility. Its JSONB column stores schema-less data inside the same database, so you get MongoDB's looseness without leaving Postgres.

→ Pick MongoDB only if your data is self-contained documents with no links, and you need massive write volume on day one.

→ The early trap with MongoDB: six months in, five different shapes of "user" and no clean fix. Postgres forces the structure.

→ Next: start on managed Postgres (Supabase, Neon, RDS).

Same information. One of them you can read at a glance.

Does it actually help? (measured, and reproducible)

The benchmark measures the work and the output separately, and the headline numbers use no LLM judge. Every figure is reproducible from this repo. Full writeup and runnable harness.