I’ve been dabbling with this course, trying to figure out where to actually start. My first instinct was to build something for the business I’m growing. Then it hit me that the project was way bigger than I’d assumed. It probably shouldn’t be my first pipeline at all. I’m not ready to run the full scope yet. So I asked a different question. What have I always wanted to build but never had the tools for? That sent me digging through an old journal I used to keep for exactly these kinds of ideas. Back in 2020 I’d written that I wanted a tool you could feed a book or any source material into and get repeatable tasks out the other side, something close to RPA. The dream was to pull from my favorite writers across the ages, build off the way they thought, and keep cultivating better processes out of one living pool of information. Yesterday I spent hours mapping how my brain actually sorts relational data and holds onto so much of it. Turns out I run an “if this then that” rule system in my head without realizing it. Once I could see it, laying out how I wanted to sort ideas got a lot easier. Then came the part I’m worst at. Explaining it so someone else can follow. Working with Claude, the wall showed up fast. The AI kept reaching for generalities while I was handing it micro details. So it filled the gaps with guesses, and it guessed based on how everyone else works instead of how I do. It didn’t understand the task or the concept. I was starting to think I’d never get the point across. Then I kept reading. A few pages further back in that same journal, I’d just finished a course on symbolism and parables. That’s where everything turned. Instead of laying the system out in flat technical terms, I gave the AI a role it could actually feel the shape of. I told it it wasn’t a slave built to do the work for me. It was a wand. And a wand is its own thing. It has a will. It chooses its wizard, and it carries its own hunger for experience and knowledge. Its job was never to cast every spell while the wizard stands there empty-handed. Its job is to work with him. To hand back the one piece he’s missing. To teach him what he needs to know so he can wield it better, so the wand itself grows sharper in his hand. The two of them rise together or not at all. The longer they work the same problems, the more the wand learns the wizard, and the better the magic gets. That was the whole point of the file system. The knowledge base was never meant to sit still. It was meant to grow with both of us at once.

Giving away this tool I built for myself to transcribe meetings for later ingestion into my project management workflow. This is peasant stuff compared to what @Ari Evergreen has been releasing lately in the dictation space but with her help I built something nice and compact for myself: an ever-present monitor ready to be invoked to transcribe meetings. Simply set your hotkey, record your meeting, enter any additional info you want to be added, and have your transcription output to a folder of your choice as an md file ready to be integrated into your ingestion workflow. Use it to record meetings or even just notes to yourself. Everything runs off a local whisper model and python and never leaves your computer. Interested? Check out the repo to try yourself: https://github.com/donroy26/meeting-transcriber