A sober wishlist of processes I’m working to automate with AI, or by other means.
The Wish: identify and contextualize product sales
The Why: …because I have a history of obsessive online window shopping. And I like the thrill of getting the best for less, buying something that will last. Even if I were among the cohort for whom a luxury expenditure is a drop in the bucket, that’s simply not the case for most, and I’d like to think I’ll always be price conscious.
Status: In progress. I’ve been thinking about building something user-facing from the start. I’m shooting for an app that, in its specificity (menswear…for nerds, arguably) might prove durable even as AI gets better. Or it might be futile. But I’m content at burning some time on this, for now. I’ve made a lot of progress, done some crafty things, and will certainly write a post about this in the future.
The Wish: more easily manage and monitor local development servers
The Why: my having access to Claude Code is like putting a paintball gun into the hands of a six year old. I want to pull the trigger. A lot. Like a maniac. And so I quickly realized I needed a better way to manage local dev servers, restart projects, stop servers lest my laptop get choked out by RAM use.
Status: Done! The result is Harbr, a menu bar app. I’ve made it open-source. You can find it on my github here.
The Wish: wrangle and reign in a f*ckload of writing, notes, journaling, bookmarks, etc.
The Why: Clumsy though human-machine interfaces may be (look at you, slapping that keyboard like a cybernetic monkey, staring at a glowing rectangle), I’m about as enmeshed with my devices as you can be, at least on some fronts. I’m no biohacker, but I am an incessant, obsessive capturer of thoughts and information. But for all of the “second brain” systems out there, none suit me, none impress me. I desperately need a way to connect, surface, and parse what I save and write more effectively.
Status: In progress. My main tool for information capture is Obsidian. There are LLM-powered plugins for it, but none of them are quite there yet relative to my needs. So I’m making my own.
The Wish: create a better way to track not only workouts, but gauge progress and needs – volume, resistance, even nutrition and sleep – more effectively, and via good science.
The Why: there are great workout and nutrition apps out there but, to begin with, these two areas are disjointed (separate apps), and don’t do a great job of helping you contextualize your activity relative to goals. My brain is always thirsting for the bigger picture.
Status: In progress, code name (not actually a code name) Thorp – an amalgamation of Ed Thorp (an unlikely fitness role model), and Jim Thorpe. So far so good; this is my first attempt at mobile development.
The Wish: automate content (mostly video) ingestion, and summary output/storage.
The Why: Life is more or less a process of taking in, assimilating, and utilizing information. And there’s a lot of good information in them there videos *points to YouTube*. But watching video is a time suck. Better to have a computer do it, especially since I’m not watching things for emotional effect, or to trigger revelation. I’m just hoovering info, and often what an LLM might not surface…or, at any rate, call it curation and leave me be.
Status: In ideation, but to be honest I’ll likely be raw-dogging a [paste resource link into NotebookLM] -> [copy output and paste into Obsidian] workflow for the foreseeable future. I haven’t yet sunk a ton of time into this.
The Wish: make multi-platform e-commerce operations easier
The Why: I have a teeny-tiny e-commerce business, and tying listings, lots of SKUs, prices, discounts, inventory, finances, etc. together was driving me insane. Shopify and its plugins admittedly do a lot of things very well (including cross-posting to eBay), but have their limits.
Status: Operational, and tweaking constantly. I built myself a pretty comprehensive e-commerce dashboard. Product listings sync, as do accounts from my business bank account via a very handy bridge. Maybe I’ll fortify and modularize this app, make it available to others eventually.
Workflow Wishlist
A sober wishlist of processes I’m working to automate with AI, or by other means.