I don't understand the point of writing and sharing this.
Don't want to use a service anymore? Fine, stop using it and move to something else. But why publish something that you knows for sure is just going to be bad press for another company and organization?
And I'm sorry to nitpick - but "People who rely on AI are the ones who will be left behind" is NOT the opposite of "People who don't use AI will be left behind".
I have it installed on an extra macbook pro that I had available. I'm really only using it at the moment for one use case:
Nightly, I have OpenClaw pull the latest changes from a private GitHub repo that is my Obsidian notes vault. It then looks to see which new notes have been added and then runs a "create flashcard" skill to extract and author useful flashcards for spaced-repetition practice. I then gave it access to a custom web-based spaced-repetition flash card application that I built a few months ago. It uses an API to insert new cards, check to see when I last reviewed cards and optionally send me a nudge reminder if I haven't reviewed cards in a few days.
It is a nice workflow that has been working well. I go to class, take notes in Obsidian and check in my changes. By the next day, when I open my flashcard app on my phone, I have new cards to review from yesterday's class.
You should ask claude code to write a bash script that does this for you. Then run that as a Cronjob every night. You might not need any inference at all to create the flash cards so it would be free.
Why not use Claude one single time to create a service that does this? I have this same question with 90% of the 'simple' use cases I see for these task runners, it always seems more efficient (not to mention consistent) to have it generate the service.
I cringe at my old boss’s handiwork in Claude and power automate sometimes and go “you know I could just do that in a script and a cron job and it would be completely bullet proof, right?”
Then he just shoots back with, “yeah but now I don’t have to ask you.”
This is my kludge, there are many others like it but this one is mine.
Does the boss not understand that they could get Claude to write them a script and a crontab entry (so they don't have to ask you) -- and then run it forever (so they don't have to pay Anthropic, or risk temperature randomness)? Best of both worlds...
But I actually did appreciate the one time he handed me a Cisco config that was 90% perfect and took me all of 5 minutes to fix. Sometimes the three of us make a hell of a team.
I use both actually. Anki for the reviews since the spaced repetition is hard to beat, but I use Norsha Notes (norshanotes.com) to generate the cards. You upload your notes or study material and it creates flashcards from them using AI, then you can export as .apkg and import straight into Anki. Saves a ton of time over making cards manually.
I had used Anki for a few years but recently migrated all my cards out of it and into a custom app I built just a few months ago. It is as an Elixir/Phoenix app with a simple UI but also with a rich API for Agent integration.
Very nice and I just did the exact same thing recently!
When I was in first or second grade (circa 1982) our family got a TRS-80 Model 3 and I started learning BASIC on it. I built a bunch of small little programs and even started an ambitious project: a full text adventure game called "Manhole Mania!". You, as the player, were a public works employee sent into the sewers to investigate strange noises. I never made much progress, maybe only a few rooms.
Just a couple of weeks ago I had the idea of just pointing Codex CLI at my unfinished game idea and "one-shotting" it. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt, constrained it to use Elm and to make it a static website. Gave a rough outline of a simple, but playable Manhole Mania. 5 mins, 43 seconds later:
Lost me at "React is a Framework" assertion. The key difference between a "framework" and a "library" is the inversion of control that exists in a framework.
React is a library - your app still maintains control of application state and drives the main workings of the application. It is just simply using the React library to render that application state.
Fully agree, Inversion of Control is not something which alone defines something as a framework. When defining it along the architectural axis React is architecturally unopinionated thus is has library-level scope, but framework-like control semantics. If framework = anything that uses inversion of control, then a lot of things suddenly become frameworks, including things nobody calls frameworks. One can call it a "rendering framework" but calling it a "web-application framework" is not factually correct.
Wow this hits home - I just turned 51 and I also started coding at age 7, writing BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III.
I still have a very distinct memory when my father told me he was buying us our first home computer. I remember him telling me that you could use the computer to make games. I was so excited by the idea and amazing by this technology (that I hadn't yet even remotely understood). I remember saying "Oh, you just tell it to make a game? And it makes a game?" He explained to me then what programming was.
When we got the TRS-80, he and I worked together to build a game. We came up with an idea for a text adventure game called "Manhole Mania" - you were a city works employee exploring the sewers after reports of strange noises. We never finished much of it - maybe just the first few "rooms".
Maybe this weekend I will tell Codex to make me a game.
So just because we now have "automated programming" agents, every project should eschew the use of a known, tested set of libraries or an entire framework and instead build everything from the ground up? That is insane.
Don't want to use a service anymore? Fine, stop using it and move to something else. But why publish something that you knows for sure is just going to be bad press for another company and organization?
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