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Advancing Work Alone Only Advances Work: A 5-Month Record of Solving the Woodcutter's Dilemma with Claude Code - RAKUS Developers Blog

AIFirst seen October 19, 2026215 points

A Japanese engineer at the company RAKUS wrote about a five-month experiment. He used Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, to make himself do a weekly self-review every Friday. The goal was to fix the habit of planning to improve but never actually doing it.

What happened

The author found that he could not keep up his personal weekly reviews. He wrote 'Keep, Problem, Try' notes, but he forgot them, his goals stayed vague, and he skipped busy weeks. So he built a system. Every Friday at 12:00, Windows Task Scheduler starts Claude Code automatically. The AI then asks him to review his week, and it checks his notes against a set of job-level rules.

The problem he was solving

The author compares his problem to the parable of the woodcutter. He is too busy cutting wood to sharpen his saw, even though sharpening would make him faster. He saw that the real obstacles were costs: starting the review takes effort, writing well takes time, and remembering past weeks is hard. Nobody is waiting for the review, so there is no deadline. His fix was to remove these costs with a system, not with willpower.

Key facts

The review runs every Friday at 12:00.
The author ran the system for five months.
Each weekly session returns five parts: Keep/Problem/Try notes, a table showing whether each action fits the current job level or the next one, a strict critique, a Try rewritten to be testable, and points to check next week.
All past results are saved in one Markdown file that the AI reads before each session.

Why it matters

This story shows a simple idea that many people can use. Growth needs a regular check of how you work, but people often skip it. By letting the AI start the review, keep the memory, and push for honest answers, the author turned a habit he could not keep into a routine that runs. The article is also a useful example of how AI can act as a long-term memory and a practice partner, not just a one-time helper.

What to watch

Whether the AI keeps its strict tone, since the author found that AI tends to be too kind by default.
Whether Try goals with clear deadlines get done, such as asking a teammate to test a tool.
Whether the author keeps the system going beyond five months.

Glossary

Claude Code: An AI tool from Anthropic that helps people write and work with code, here used to run weekly reviews.
RAKUS: The Japanese company whose engineering blog published this article.