5 posts tagged with "AI"

Over a year ago I started working with N8N, a self-hosted automation platform similar to Zapier that connects to basically any service you can imagine. They had a built-in AI agent builder that let me wire up my own bot using the OpenRouter API. This was before tools were a thing, before ChatGPT could search the web, before any of the major AI products had live internet access. My little bot could search the web. I remember showing that off to friends and feeling like I'd built something genuinely ahead of the curve.

Every draft of this post came back flat.

I'd describe the idea to Claude, get something back that was structured and coherent and said all the right things, and then I'd sit there trying to figure out why it didn't feel like mine. The arguments were sound. The flow was fine. But it read like a blog post about taste written by a system that doesn't have any. I kept editing, pushing it away from the centre, trying to find the version that actually sounded like me thinking out loud rather than an AI summarizing a concept.

That editing process is the whole point of this post.

I wanted to learn trading like a professional, not from YouTube personalities pushing their strategies, but from foundational knowledge drawn from the best traders and theory. No academy I know of offers this, but I knew the knowledge existed, it was just scattered and gated. So I overengineered the problem and built a system that could teach me.

I recently checked my OpenRouter stats and discovered something surprising: I've used more credits than 98% of people on the platform. Not because I run an AI company or manage a team of engineers. Just me, using AI to augment my daily life.

Over the year, I've accumulated hundreds of millions of tokens across different models as I upgraded, experimented, and built systems that work. That's roughly equivalent to writing 4,000 novels worth of text. All this testing and development has taught me deeply about how AI models work together, what they're each good at, and what it really takes to build reliable AI systems.

I used to subscribe to way too many newsletters. Each one had good insights, but reading through them every morning felt like wading through the same ideas dressed up in different words. I was spending an hour each day on information I could have absorbed in ten minutes, and the redundancy was killing me.