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This is where OpenAI has an advantage over Anthropic. While its models are trailing Anthropic's in recent months, its investments in product, consumer experience, site publishing, voice, and hardware are all directions that have clearer moats.

I was with you up until this point. I don’t think OpenAI has any more of a substantial product moat than Anthropic; if anything, the Claude / mythos etc brand is a valuable asset that OpenAI lacks.

Yes, many of the elite HN engineer always online types have come to prefer Codex, and but if you actually talk to regular engineers in industry, agentic coding is simply still synonymous with Claude Code.

And for the non-engineering uses, Claude is so much more pleasant of a conversational companion than any of the GPT line, and I suspect is this baked deeply into the model, otherwise OpenAI would have closed this gap by now.

This one observation changes everything.

PSA this is satire ;)

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

The term that I saw once, and now constantly land back on, is “meaning shaped”

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

“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells.

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

That said I enjoyed the article!

100% agree. Took me ages of working with the agents to circle back around this, which was the best way to get work done before AI automation anyways.

Openclaw allows you to effectively “shell out” to another harness for your model calls, while still using Pi as your main agentic harness. This is the claude -p workflow. Tools and skills are injected into Claude and they hack session persistence into it as well.

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.

If it's a big one and it's near you, you'd move away from the windows and heavy things that can fall, I suppose?

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.

Felt it all the way in Tokyo!

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/

Yes, every day.

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.

Some creative workflows genuinely benefit from the tablet form factor. I often do serious photo editing on the iPad because I have access to Apple Pencil, and, somehow, holding the thing in my hands like an actual physical object activates some different more analog brain region for me than using a laptop / desktop, and it’s helpful to my creative process. Lightroom for iPad is quite capable but it requires some power.

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.

What an amazing feeling to see my flash animations I made when I was 13 on this site. Great project! What a unique era that time on the internet was. Can hardly imagine what my life would be today had it not been for Flash.

Thank you!

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.

Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.

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 do this, but it’s an Apple Notes file with a quick open shortcut mapped to the action button (side button) on my iPhone.

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)

How is doomscrolling profitable for Apple?

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 :)

You’re decreasing coupling at the cost of introducing more entities, and a different sort of complexity, into your system.

Sometimes it’s absolutely worth it. Sometimes not.

I can’t explain why but “He’s assigning 128 to a string called Q” made me absolutely lose it.

This is good to know. I’ll probably play around with it sometime in the future.

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

Such a useful walkthrough.

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.

Shameless plug for anybody who has been through the hell that is Anki card creation for language learning - I built an LLM powered extension for Anki that allows you to wire up fields to arbitrary prompts, and then generate notes in batch (or selectively per field). I use it every day for generating example sentences, definitions, and TTS. Would have quit Anki ages ago without this.

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.

Another visitor was spending a leisurely week in Morioka alone before heading to Fukuoka for a few months.

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

Do a bunch of other things

Curious about this! Currently trying to figure out a good 0.3mg melatonin dosing regimine for myself.

Thank you :) And, sounds like great fun. Shoot me an email (in bio) or let me know how best to get in touch.

Wow, so feature rich, congrats on the release. Love that the mnemonic generation takes into account your existing memory anchors (didn’t know that term).

I’ve actually been working on a similar-ish Anki Plugin for about 6 months - it can autogenerate any field via LLM in bulk, as well as images and TTS. I’m not explicitly targeting the med school use case as much yours (I use it for language learning), and it’s more GUI centric/geared towards non-technical Anki users who don’t want to fiddle with a bunch of different API keys etc. Was planning to launch HN soon but you beat me to the punch!

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 https://smart-notes.xyz

I would suggest building something that you yourself find useful / solving a problem that you regularly face that doesn’t have a satisfactory off the shelf solution.

Note that this implies spending time in a different problem domain than just programming all day (alternately read as: have a hobby or two).

I finally have a side project with traction & paying users and it’s because sheer frustration drove me to improve an inefficient workflow in my language learning process (hobby), which turned out to not be such a unique problem at the end of the day.

(Not to shill - I was a frustrated Anki user and built this to improve my own life: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 )

That would be really cool. Unfortunately there's not much you can do on mobile with Anki extensions, so what you've described would have to be a standalone app. You could definitely wire up TTS fields with this add-on, but you'd still have to manually rate your answer.

Same! There was another add-on that sort of did it, but it was broken with modern versions of Anki. Was very surprised nobody built this yet.

I’m working on an Anki Addon that streamlines the hell out of the card generation process using LLMs. You can define a schema of prompts for your note type & fields, where each prompt can reference other fields, and use it to generate things like translations, example sentences, mnemonics, for tens of thousands of cards in batches or in the fly as they’re reviewed. These generated fields can reference other generated fields so it’s actually a fully fledged DAG under the hood! It also supports TTS in 50+ languages. Soon adding image generation support.

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

It’s a paid service at $5/mo with a free trial. Just cracked $50/MRR! Baby steps, but the value is clearly there. Need to tighten up a couple things, especially the web presence and onboarding, before I start marketing more. The tragic irony is that I’m spending all my language learning time building this (alas there can be no other way).

This is great, going to try this approach with my Japanese Anki reps.

Mind linking out to Katzumoto’s Anki advice? Is this this one? https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/setting-up-anki.html