Isn't it interesting then how much of our intelligence is captured by our words/language? I would've thought to create AI you needed to replicate neurons and synapses and learning. So it's still amazing to me that statistical modelling of our words creates a Claude Opus.
While I don't disagree, there is a scale/volume problem I wanted to solve. If I read to my kids 365 days a year for 8-10 years, that's over 3,500 books. There's a lot of crap publishing out there just cause it's "natural" or "human" does not make it good. So yes we read the classics, but it's great to have a fun creative book factory.
Now that's a Black Mirror episode. It's the story of all technology though, caveat emptor.
For me it's still about human connection though. I read the stories we create together. It's just a great tool. It makes any topic relatable. I.e. even crazy fun ones like "Claude weave a bedtime story about how the 5nm chip fab process works including EUV lithography and clean rooms".
Quick short 5-10 minute read and next thing you know we're talking about lasers and how sand becomes computers.
This just seems like laziness vs AI = bad. It's not like publishers are putting out masterpieces with human writing. They're cranking out minimum viable content as well.
I've found that by putting meaningful effort into AI storytelling, I can create bespoke stories that my kids love night after night.
My workflow is below: Caveat that it costs about $0.25-$0.50 to weave a book like this with Claude Sonnet and Gemini Nano Banana Pro. But to me the cost is worth it for the quality.
- Use Claude structured output and ask for page1, page2 ... pageN instead of an array of pages or wall of text.
- Pass a story arc as a set of values to the prompt. I.e. say each page has an emotional beat between 0.0 and 1.0. For a "man in hole" type of story: page1 starts at 0.6, page2 = 0.5, page5 = 0.25, page10 = 0.85. This ensures page 5 lands the "crisis" and page10 resolves higher than the start.
- For illustrations, have Claude generate the story text and an illustration prompt per page. i.e. page1: { "text": "...", "illustration": "..." }.
- For art consistency, add an "Art Direction" key to the structured output. Feed this into Gemini/OpenAI and ask for an art board visual guide & character reference sheet.
- Feed the page text, illustration prompt, and the art board to Gemini/ChatGPT images. I'm constantly surprised at the quality of the output.
Here's an example set of pages from a magic school bus style story about the immune system
Yes this, I bought sets like the Arctic Ship and police bases thinking they'd be like dioramas. They quickly became components that they build other things on top of. It took some time to mentally un-anchor from the $500 spent on the sets lol.
I use all three (MCP/CLI/API) based on what Claude excels at:
* CLI: GitHub & AWS it already knows how to operate the CLIs well. Even learned about a few new CLIs like 1Password's op which it volunteered one day.
* MCP: Supabase, Shopify etc. where the CLI would be non-obvious and the affordances from the tools/descriptions helps Claude maneuver.
* API: Sometimes it just knows an API exists and is able to call it directly with python/curl. I discovered from Claude the Pokemon ecosystem has a free API out there for example.
The analogy is helpful, but yes we should be able to “intelligently design” something better than sleep analogues since we’re not constrained by evolution like in humans.
I gave up on Plex and just vibe coded a couple quick solutions instead:
- Direct streaming 4K blu-ray atmos rips to home theater: just connected a PC via long HDMI fiber optic cable
- Library organization: tinyMediaManager is awesome for this.
- Watching ad hoc on iPad/iPhone: built a simple Next.js app that lists my movies and and a python script that encodes movies as MP4 and creates HLS playlists. No more real time transcoding.
- Downloading movies to my iPad for long flights: vibe coded an iOS app Claude handled all the AV code to download the same HLS streams.
I wonder how much this is correlated to token budgets? I'd be curious to see a split between $20/$100/$200/$500+ usage and see if there is different responses. I'm in the $400 range with Claude + Cursor subscription, use Opus exclusively, and my experience is wildly different from this.
I chuckled cause the convenience/grocery store is laid out to make us find the high margin items and not what we need. They can't explain it to us otherwise we'd shop less.
Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
I was looking at object storage recently and I hadn't realized how much profit cloud providers drive via egress. And it's so perfectly hidden from the marketing. Ended up going with Cloudflare R2 for free egress.
Yes, I just think there's a sane way to do things that is not "never let LLM agents do things".
For dev/prod staging though, there's that other story on HN right now of an LLM agent that maneuvered it's way to prod credentials and destroyed prod. And backups went along with it. I'm paranoid enough to think backups in this use case means out-of-band uncorrelated storage.
I just think there's more nuance to it. Some things have an implicit RTO/RPO/SLA of say a day. Risk is also correlated to recovery and rollback. And there's levels of LLMs out there.
Surely in the Venn Diagram of things, there's a slot where it's okay let a Claude Opus agent run on a process with good backups/recovery? Where taking the risk of a 1-hour restore job is worth the LLM agent velocity?
For extra paranoia, surely even Opus/Mythos can't figure out how to destroy log level backups to immutable storage.
Underrated comment here. https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function This study convinced me to be "nice" to AI agents. At least as I understood it, there's something in the weights that activating the "desperate" vector makes it more likely to cheat or cut corners. So yes I would err towards your suggested prompt over NEVER FUCKING GUESS.
