Stop 4 of 8 · Weekly
The study report
Findings into the agency's report format, with every number tied to a table and every conclusion left in brackets for the engineer who signs it.
Where the evening goes
The analysis was finished on Tuesday. The report takes until Sunday. Not because the findings are hard, but because every finding has to be written twice: once in the operations section, once in the executive summary, and often a third time in the conclusions, in an agency format with its own section numbering and caption style. Then somebody checks that the delay in the text matches the delay in the table, and roughly one in twenty does not.
Claude is good at exactly that: moving a number from a table into a sentence, in a fixed format, without getting tired on page 40. It is bad at the one thing the report exists for, which is deciding what the numbers mean.
Two rules that make the draft usable
Every number names its table. Every conclusion comes out.
The first rule turns checking from rereading into spot checking. If the text says 41.2 seconds per Table 4, Leila opens Table 4. If the text says 41.2 seconds and names nothing, she has to find where it came from, and she will not, at 11 pm on a Sunday.
The second rule is the stamp rule in its report form. Claude drafts, the licensed engineer decides and signs. Anything of the shape "meets", "is justified", "is adequate", "is acceptable" or "no mitigation is required" is left in square brackets with the evidence under it, and Leila writes the sentence herself.
The section order
| Section | What Claude drafts from |
|---|---|
| Existing conditions | Count tables, the field notes, the geometry description |
| Operations analysis | The Synchro reports and the level of service tables |
| Safety analysis | The crash tables, with no rate and no conclusion |
| Findings and recommendations | Bracketed placeholders only, written by Leila |
| Executive summary | The finished body, after Leila has written the findings |
The summary goes last. Written first, it becomes a set of conclusions the body then has to agree with, which is the wrong direction.
Draft Section 4, Operations Analysis, in the format of the approved study in the files. Use only the level of service and queue tables I have given you. For every value, name the table it comes from in the sentence. Where a sentence would state that an operation is acceptable, that a warrant is met, or that mitigation is or is not required, write the evidence and put [ENGINEER CONCLUSION] in place of the judgement. List at the end every number you could not source.
[upload the draft report and the table workbook] Check this draft against these tables. Give me a table of three columns: the sentence in the report, the value it states, and the value in the source table. List only rows where they disagree, where the report states a value that appears in no table, or where a table value is never mentioned in the text. Do not correct anything.
The body is final and the findings are written. Draft the executive summary in the approved study's format, two pages maximum, using only sentences whose substance already appears in the body. No number appears here that is not in the body, and no recommendation appears here that I have not already written in Section 7.