Just Some Quick Thoughts on How I Use AI Tools

I use AI for all kinds of things now, pretty aggressively.

I'll just throw some things down into this, some of which I did today.

Setting up Obsidian to work as a daily notetaking system

I wanted to setup a daily note taking system that syncs between all my devices and moves any tasks I haven't finished from one day to the next. I also knew that I wanted to use obsidian to do this. I wasn't sure how to make that happen, so I used a series of OpenAI and claude calls over the course of a few weeks to figure out the best system to do that. The first iteration wasn't ideal, but eventually I figured out a system I liked.

It's a combo of several Community plugins eg. Calendar, Dataview, Periodic Notes, Rollover Daily Todos, Tasks, Templater that produces and auto-note daily that roll's over all tasks from the day before.

Obsidian Daily Notes Setup

Building this Website

I built it using a library that I was interested in (FastHTML) but didn't know how to use. I read the documentation but honestly wasn't really able to figure out how to do it. I made several attempts, including some AI assisted attempts, but really wasn't able to get it fully working until using Claude Code. I used the llms.txt file which is a proposal for helping LLMs use codebase documentation from Jeremy Howard. Code for it is based here.

The details on how to host and things I got through a combination of AI tools, mostly anthropic, plus some guidance from videos and "classes" from Jeremy Howard at fast.ai.

First Pass Researching Things to Buy

As a general rule, when I want to buy some decently major object, I start with a deep research question on it, specifically telling the AI to use wirecutter and reddit/r/buy_it_for_life as the starting off point on it, plus non-reddit hobbyist forums. This actually has worked out really well. At this point I don't generally use that as the final say on what to get, but I find it works well as a good grounding point to confirm what the AI said about some product, and maybe do a quick bit of additional research on my own.

I found the bed cover for my truck this way (ChatGPT conversation)

Same with some shirts, though this was less successful honestly (ChatGPT conversation)

Helping Me Figure out how to Route a Cable in the Truck

This is a single chat about this, but I used pictures and multiple deep research articles to figure out how to tap power off a dash fuse in the passenger area and run a cable to the driver side to act as a clean install for a phone mount charging system. Claude conversation

Truck cable routing project

General Thoughts

Claude Code or Gemini CLI are great for personal coding projects, and honestly possibly some other things as well. I know someone who used it to list things of theirs to sell on craigslist.

Combine this stuff with a good dictation software (I used whisper flow currently) so you can just context dump everything in your head into the model and let the model figure it out.

Just throw random stuff at them. If you have a question, just take a picture of it and ask.

  • "What is this fuse? (picture)"
  • "Where is this document I want? (internet search)"
  • (Claude Code or Gemini CLI question) "Where the heck did I store this photo on my hard drive (description)"
  • "What the hell was the name of that guy that ran for president back in 2012 or something that used to be famous in movies but wasn't Reagan?"
  • "Here's my notes, organize this better and add all the links to things I'm missing in proper markdown so I can post it and send it to someone so it's useful"