/notes

Insane work by Michel Gondry.

Something I have been noodling on is how to integrate AI in ways that can help alleviate some of the burden of running your small business as the sole person responsible for all of the business operation. When you have to be sales, marketing, and admin, it leaves less time for doing the work that made you want to run the business in the first place. I don’t think you can eliminate or entirely abstract away all of those roles, but you can extend your capabilities. AI being the great equalizer of mediocrity means, at the very least, you have the ability to get a decent baseline of service for say, web marketing initiatives, that you simply wouldn’t necessarily have had the time for before.

I tinkered with a plugin for Claude over the weekend that acts as a mini “Web Marketing Agency”. Very simply there is a director role that acts as orchestration and final say, with sub agents for various specific roles such as CRO, Copywriter, Growth, SEO, Strategy, with an adversary type role to push back on assumptions, find gaps, and iterate back and forth with the subagent until there is consensus. If consensus cannot be found, the Director takes over and acts as final arbiter to ensure the plan aligns with bigger picture goals and such. The end result is a plan for executing some web marketing initiative.

The few tests I have run have been pretty good, if maybe a bit verbose. Nothing that cannot be fine tuned.

To take this a step further would be to hand off the plan to content and developer subagents to actually implement on a website, then hand off for approval and revisions by a human.

Heck yeah, I can slop out a tool for my blog in absolutely no time now. I’ve manifested a very simple CMS UI for my Middleman based static website. It’s a TypeScript+React companion app that uses TipTap markdown editor that I can run when I am in bloggy mode.

It’s kinda weird that I am now able to materialize software on demand.

https://charity.wtf/2022/08/15/live-your-best-life-with-structured-events/ Live Your Best Life With Structured Events.

If your tool set no longer works for you, friend, it’s time to go all in. Maybe what you wanted was a faster horse, but it’s time for a car, and the sooner you turn in your oats for gas cans and a spare tire, the better.

In brief: if you aren’t rolling out a solution based on arbitrarily wide, structured raw events that are unique and ordered and trace-aware and without any aggregation at write time, you are going to regret it. (If you aren’t using OpenTelemetry, you are going to regret that, too.)

https://sterlinghamilton.com/en/shared-reality/ Good article about how to think about and work with coding agents. Simply said, adopt a spec-driven, test-driven, pair-coding model with your agents and you will have far better results. Define the shared reality in which we, both humans and coding agents, operate. Much like developing the ubiquoutous language required under a domain-driven development model. Crucial for deep understanding.

Well, I officially have 2 users on Teddy Diary – myself and my wife 😂. She excitedly asked if she could also use the app after I shared the weekly summaries and entry suggestion/prompt.

We may be going home this year )‘(

I was inspired by the consistent habit of Theodore Roosevelt to log his daily events in a pocket diary and so I have built, for myself, a simple Rails app to do just that. To offset the slight inconvenience a digital version has over simply carrying a notebook around (as I already often do), this version will gently nag me when I do not enter anything for the daily entry. Additionally I get a weekly summary outlining key events, missed opportunities, and some more gentle nudging around goals and actions, which are generated by a locally hosted LLM running on Ollama. I am calling it “Teddy Diary”.

The intention is not to reflect, or to vent. It is write facts only, to focus on the verbs (met, walked, wrote, read), and to track effort, not outcomes, just as Mr. Roosevelt himself did.

Currently I exist in a strange place where I know a thing, but cannot explain said thing deeply and technically. Frustrating. Perhaps too much embodied cognition, not enough dialogue, not enough discourse.

The good news is that this a learnable skill. Something to practice.

I am reading too much about 19th century men who had a gift for speech. They were built different. I am built from passive consumption of soundbites and infotainment.

Anyway. Lots of thinking about, thinking, and a lot of thinking about speaking.