July 21, 2026

Annotation tool (source)

One of the main ways I work with AI since I had a baby 5 months ago is prompting genies from my phone while I'm naptrapped or breastfeeding (did you know newborns feed for ~5 hours per day?! I did not). It’s very sweet and cozy napping with a baby but eventually also boring.

Anyway it’s very cumbersome to review code when building things this way, but I decided that’s mostly fine since for a lot of little personal utilities I have it build I don't really care whether the code is particularly good or not (although I do find lately it writes perfectly passable Clojure, still my language of choice in this age of AI).

I always have it set up CI from the start so the project ships somewhere I can try it out from my phone and give feedback, but sometimes the tools are CLIs or other utilities I want for when I'm back at my desk. In those cases I have Claude write a book about how the project works for me, then I give feedback based on that about what needs to change (either in the project itself or just the prose). The result is that I understand the project and end with an edited book I can reference as documentation. This has been working great for me and has been resulting in many useful personal tools that I'm really enjoying building and using.

To make the process of giving feedback on books (or any other text) easier, I had the AI build itself this little annotation tool. It lets me paste a link in (to e.g. one of the deployed book chapters), then I can highlight particular passages and copy the feedback in a way that is easy for a genie to act on. You could use it for anything that requires taking notes on specific passages of a webpage though.

tool#ai#clojure#coding-agents#documentation#personal#tools

December 30, 2024

Overcoming perfectionism

The main thing I want to overcome in 2025 is perfectionism. I have a very hard time making progress on projects until I'm confident they'll be "good", but the problem is that this is a totally arbitrary descriptor and usually irrelevant anyway. Not wanting to do things unless they're perfect prevents me from doing so many things in the first place. It's very frustrating but I don't know how to fix it yet. This is something I plan to work on this year. […1 min read]

post#personal#reflections

February 7, 2021

I Need People

This is the second post in a series about things the 2020 pandemic has taught me. The first was that journalism is important. This one is about appreciating my friends and family in a new way. I've always loved the people in my life, but the feeling of actually needing other people, like for survival, is new to me. I've always had this strong sense that worst case scenario I would always be fine on my own. Like if I really had to I could hack it alone, and that might not be ideal but in the end I'd be more or less fine. I realize now I was wrong. […4 min read]

post#community#pandemic#personal

January 30, 2021

December 31, 2020

2020 Year In Review

I'm really excited that 2020 is over! This was the hardest year of my life so far. It was also the first one that was worse and not better than all the previous ones, which I'm really hoping is not a new trend. When I thought about it a bit I realized I still did a lot of cool things and learned a lot this year though. […12 min read]

post#personal#reflections#year-notes

September 16, 2020

An Atheist Tries Religion

I grew up as an outsider to religion. I never considered it a worthwhile pursuit and spent quite a few years as an outspoken critic. As an adult I began to explore it for myself, and I now have what I would count as a spiritual life. I still find most of what religions teach very hard to believe, but I've also found a lot of value in them. My secular education left me desperately unprepared for the hardships of adulthood and, like many people who turn to religion, when life sent me seeking answers I ended up in church. Spoiler alert: I didn't find any answers, but I did find wisdom and traditions that I now believe have great potential. […10 min read]

post#faith#personal#religion