(if you have to say it, that’s how you know it’s good)

At a quick glance, it looks like a thing that should contain meaning and substance. At any closer inspection, it falls apart completely.

Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.

That said I enjoyed the article!

They also absolutely blocked OpenClaw system prompts from this path in the prior weeks, based purely on keyword detection. Seems they’ve undone that now.

For me I always just turn on iPhone screen recording and marvel at this amazing app and wish we had something like this in California.

There is this amazing app called NERV that, whenever there is a large earthquake anywhere in Japan, sends you an early warning push notification and an animated display with shockwaves emanating from the epicenter, plus a countdown timer for the first wave hitting you. The first it went off for me it felt like something out of sci-fi. I think I got 45 seconds this time before my apartment started shaking.

https://nerv.app/en/

Similar to other users here, giving it access to an Obsidian vault has been the key for me. And I wouldn't discount how much the chat interface matters - Telegram is so much nicer to use for extended conversations than the Claude or ChatGPT apps, etc.

You can feed these tools context about your day to day life, and make them increasingly useful and personalized, in a way that you can't with vanilla ChatGPT/Claude etc without relying on some opaque memory system.

Here's a few things I'm using it for. A lot of things uses cases are fairly trivial but a bunch of small, daily QoL improvements add up:

- Calorie and macro tracker.

- Day to day todo list, obsidian wrangling.

- Tech support for family: I have a group chat we're all part of, and I've created OpenClaw skills for frequently asked questions, a memory system to remember questions, and a periodic 'quiz' based on previously asked questions to help everyone "learn to fish", bit by bit.

- Interface to Anki. Bit of a longer one here that I should write up, but it's easy to use it add cards to Anki on the go and review missed cards from today, ask clarifying questions, etc.

- One off reminders.

- Light mental health support for family / friends. An agent that remembers the cool things you've done lately and proactively reminds you of them, helping you zoom out a bit, has been helpful for those in my life whose brains, for whatever reason, tend towards more negative cognitive patterns. (There is definitely a more refined product here)

- General questions / curiosity; stuff I would otherwise use Claude for that's simply nicer in Telegram.

- Language studying support. I'm studying Japanese and OpenClaw helps me by studying whole sentences, tricky grammar concepts, kanji I commonly mix up - all backed by a well organized Obsidian vault. I add to this system constantly.

And then visual artists are often using Procreate, and those files can get heavy as well.

Plus, it’s nice to carry my iPad around with me in a sling and work in a cafe whenever I feel like it. I wouldn’t want to do that with my 16” MBP.

Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.

My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.

https://smart-notes.xyz

Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.

It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.

I finally figured this setup this year. It had changed my life, in a minor yet significant way.

(I also link to other relevant text files at the top of the doc)

Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.

Happy to be corrected though, of course :)

Sometimes it’s absolutely worth it. Sometimes not.

BTW, appreciate your many great write-ups - they’ve been invaluable for keeping up to date in this space.

It looks like Mitchell is using an agentic framework called Amp (I’d never heard of it) - does anybody else here use it or tried it? Curious how it stacks up against Claude Code.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719

https://smart-notes.xyz

FWIW I did get a lot more mileage from building my own deck vs a custom deck too, would recommend that approach regardless once you're past the initial vocab bootstrapping phrase.

Oh hey, that was me! Small (internet) world, huh :)