- Active recall studying app that allows a user to practice active recall[0]. The app hides user provided content at first and asking the user to try to remember all they can before reading the content. Then the user goes through the material slowly revealing each paragraph from their input. At the end they try to actively remember what they learned and can even compare to what they knew at the start.
- Mixtape sharing platform for midwest emo[1] which is a genre I've really gotten into over the past few years. The community is pretty strong on YouTube for creating "mixtapes" so I wanted a spot that was just for these videos.
- PhotoForge[2] Photographer's companion app which can help me choose photos using a Tinder-esque swiping mechanism. It also has some AI stuff for generating Instagram descriptions. Finally has a watermark tool. Still trying to think of other stuff to add. This was an AI code weekend project so it's like a house on stilts at the moment but I plan to give it some more love soon
> At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it.
Appreciate you saying this because it is my biggest gripe in these conversations. Even if it makes me faster I now have to put time into reading the code multiple times because I have to internalize it.
Since the code I merge into production "is still my responsibility" as the HN comments go, then I need to really read and think more deeply about what AI wrote as opposed to reading a teammate's PR code. In my case that is slower than the 20% speedup I get by applying AI to problems.
I'm sure I can get even more speed if I improve prompts, when I use the AI, agentic vs non-agentic, etc. but I just don't think the ceiling is high enough yet. Plus I am someone who seems more prone to AI making me lazier than others so I just need to schedule when I use it and make that time as minimal as possible.
This was a great refresher on things I’ve seen writings of but never thought deeply about. A lot of it already “made sense” yet in my day to day I’m still doing the bad versions of the prompts.
Do you have preference n a more continual system like Claude Code for one big prompt or just trying to do one task and starting something new?
Having a lot of context in the main agent is an antipattern. You want the main agent to call subagents to keep high level reasoning context clean. If you're not using subagents you should start a new chat any time you're doing something fairly different from what you were doing before.
This was such a nice write up that highlighted what I’ve seen in so many “First $X MMR” essays that were too long. Thanks for sticking to the points with short examples.
I'm curious how clean is your handwriting? I just did a test run with Claude (pro plan) and it could not understand my iPad + iPencil notes. I expected this since they are close to chicken scratch. ChatGPT told me "I ran OCR on your notes, but the handwriting/scan quality makes the transcription pretty rough—lots of words are garbled."
Then I tried a handwritten note that was some of my average handwriting and it did okay-ish. I think it would be acceptable to use if I also store the original note image with the transcribed text and for basic searching.
I agree with you I prefer writing physically but need a system for digitizing.
I'm honestly not sure how my handwriting is - I haven't had someone ready my handwriting anything outside of math or computer science in a decade. I would guess my handwriting is an average man's. Legible, but might take a sec to read at points.
If I have lines that run to the end of the page and stuff gets garbled, Claude does struggle with that and says it added some assumptions in.
Self hosting Karakeep[0] for this. I think next step is to carve out time on Sunday morning to go through things and put them in lists of read vs unread.
I agree with your comment as an additional way to look at the problem but want to also mention something I heard on a podcast a few months ago.
Paraphrasing "If you get good at seeing red flags it doesn't make you good at seeing green ones. When you optimize against failure you don't optimize for success. So on and so forth."
A failed founder can tell you what broke but won't know what else could've gone wrong or rather what else they needed to go right.
No longer employed but from my past year's experience I became disillusioned with it. I think it maybe made me 20% faster? That's being generous but it could have been higher if I was really really diligent about when to use it. But like most dopamine rewarding technologies it became really easy to either just get lost in it or go through periods of not caring to use it at all because it kept giving back garbage.
Things change fast and the tech got way better as I moved from CoPilot to Cursor to finally Claude Code. But at the end of the day the amount that I understood the code I was producing versus how much I was writing was not worth it.
People talk a lot about "what you merge to production is still your code" and I agree with that. To that point whether its a shared experience or just how I'm wired I would need to put way more time in to trying to deeply understand the code than the time it took to write a great prompt that Claude could follow correctly.
We already had a script for boilerplate writing and honestly boilerplate is kinda fun to write sometimes if you have a nice keyboard. The annoying boilerplate is the more nitty gritty stuff like error handling in Go. So I guess I still support the AI tab, that's pretty nice.
I felt myself becoming "dumber" and my productivity increase wasn't worth it. Same reason I stay off TikTok and Instagram even though they sometimes have interesting reels that are actually informative.
This comment made me rethink what I have that is actually valuable data. My photos alone even if culled down to just my favorites would probably be at least a few gigs. Contacts from my phone would be small. Other than that I guess I wouldn't be devastated if I lost anything else. Probably should put my recovery keys somewhere safer but honestly the accounts most important to me don't have recovery keys.
Curious what you consider valuable data?
Edit: I should say for pictues I have around 2Tb right now (downside of being a hobby photographer)
With valuable I should've elaborated that it's my set of constantly changing daily-use data. Keychain, documents and notes, e-mail, bookmarks, active software projects, those kinds of things.
I have a large amount of memories and "mathom" as well, in double copies, but I connect and add to this data so rarely that it absolutely does not have to be part of any ongoing backup plan.
With photos, it is kinda different story. If I lost 50% of my last vacation photos, I would probably not even notice when scrolling through them. It makes me very nostalgic for analog cameras, where my parents would have to think strategically, how to use 30 or so slots on the analog film for 7 day trip.
For useful tools I basically wait until something starts appearing in multiple places like HN comments, YouTube tech videos/comments, or on Reddit. This is what led to me hearing about Claude Code and trying it out before convincing other engineers at my company to try it. Now we're considering it over Cursor not so much because of Cursor pricing change but just because Claude Code is doing so much better.
That then leads me to an even more specific topic which is how I stay on top of info about the tools I'm using and for that I tend to stick to subreddits i.e. /r/ClaudeAI
Some YouTube sources would be any of the "tech-influencers" like ThePrimeagen[0], Internet of Bugs[1], or dare I say Fireship[2]
HN is one of the worse places to keep up with it. It gets buried fast due to the comment vs upvote ratio. Just about every other social media is better - reddit, LinkedIn, FB groups, X, YouTube, TikTok, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram.
In terms of the technology adoption curve, HN is in Early Majority. Show HN is a notch ahead, and that might be the place to watch.
- Mixtape sharing platform for midwest emo[1] which is a genre I've really gotten into over the past few years. The community is pretty strong on YouTube for creating "mixtapes" so I wanted a spot that was just for these videos.
- PhotoForge[2] Photographer's companion app which can help me choose photos using a Tinder-esque swiping mechanism. It also has some AI stuff for generating Instagram descriptions. Finally has a watermark tool. Still trying to think of other stuff to add. This was an AI code weekend project so it's like a house on stilts at the moment but I plan to give it some more love soon
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXdpSfDWbGY
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS4M4WpmrY4
[2] - https://www.photoforge.fun/