My Problem 🤔
I have a problem with spoken expression that has been with me my whole life: when I talk, ideas pile up on me. My head moves faster than my voice. I start saying something, another related idea pops up, then another, and before I finish the first sentence I’ve already lost the thread. The result is that I express myself worse than I think.
Writing, on the other hand, gives me time. Writing is slow by nature, and that slowness forces me to organize. While my finger searches for the letter, the thought settles. That’s why ever since I started using Claude Code intensively, I’ve always worked with text. The keyboard is my natural filter layer.
That worked well until it stopped working.
I had an accident in a trail race. A silly fall, not-so-silly consequences, weeks of recovery, and what hurt most at the time: little mobility to type normally. All at once, my preferred way of working was blocked.
I had two options: either I used my voice or I accepted that I was going to work at an absurdly slow pace. It wasn’t a philosophical choice about modes of communicating with AI. It was pure necessity.
My Solution 🧩
I started using voice with Claude Code by force, without romanticizing the process. The first few days were exactly as bad as I expected. Cut-off sentences, ideas arriving in the wrong order, context lost along the way. The model responded well, but I was giving it mediocre material.
What I discovered right away is that the problem wasn’t the transcription tool, it was me. I didn’t know how to structure a thought for verbalizing before verbalizing it. With the keyboard I correct myself on the fly without noticing. With voice, the mistake comes out and that’s it.
So I changed my approach. Instead of trying to improvise, I started mentally preparing what I was going to say before speaking. No scripts, just a second of silence to organize:
- What context does the model need?
- What exactly do I want it to do?
- What constraints should I mention?
That second of pause was the biggest change. It’s exactly what I do with the keyboard unconsciously, but with voice I have to do it consciously and explicitly.
The other thing I learned is that voice favors brevity. When I write, I tend to add nuances. When I speak, I get to the point because keeping a long sentence in my head is exhausting. And it turns out Claude responds just as well to concise prompts as to detailed ones, as long as the context is clear.
What I ended up doing was a kind of informal protocol for voice sessions:
- Start with the what before the how
- One idea per turn, no chaining requests
- If the response isn’t what I expected, reformulate from scratch instead of correcting on top
With that schema, the sessions started to work. Not perfect, but functional.
My Result 🎯
There are situations where voice clearly wins. When I’m thinking out loud about an architecture, when I want to explore several options before writing code, when I need to describe a behavior that’s easier to narrate than to specify. The keyboard is still my primary mode, but voice is no longer the last resort.
What changed is that I learned to structure better before speaking. And that, curiously, also improved how I write prompts. The habit of pausing, of organizing before emitting, transferred over.
The accident forced me to train a skill I never would have trained voluntarily. Not because I didn’t know it existed, but because I had a comfortable alternative that I always used. When the alternative disappears, you surprise yourself with what you’re capable of learning.
If you work with language models regularly and have never tried voice, you don’t need to break anything to give it a shot. A week of voluntary keyboard restriction is enough to see if there’s something worthwhile there. It took me an accident to discover it. You have the advantage.
Keep coding, keep running 🏃♂️