Nick Fernandez

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

It's Spring Break for Claude Code! Enjoy 2x usage during off-peak hours and weekends for the next two weeks.

I think this collective feeling of "I don't enjoy coding anymore because it's so easy with AI" is good to talk about and realize, and I have it too I miss going to bed with a coding challenge I have to get through and then wake up and in the shower I get the answer and I scream EUREKA!!!!! But then you quickly just have to accept that the world has permanently changed now and it's just not going back because letting AI code for you is simply so much faster and effective and will only get better with every passing year So the better mental approach for me to these things is to just aggressively embrace it and change myself instead, if the fun in solving the challenges is gone, where else can I find the fun? I'm lucky a bit because for me the fun has always been building new things in general, not so much the coding part, although the coding challenges were fun for me too. But having ideas and just building new things was always the most fun. So I have to double down on that now, making more things and making better things and making them much faster than before. Especially now that literally everyone in the world has access to the same coding skill as everyone else (which is AI), the focus will have to aggressively be on what remains as a differentiator for me as a creator, which is my ideas and the way I execute them, not coding them So that's what I will try focus on from now on I think

i can't believe nobody caught this. Anthropic's entire growth marketing team was just ONE PERSON (for 10 months, confirmed) a single non-technical person ran paid search, paid social, app stores, email marketing, and SEO for the $380B company behind claude here's exactly how one human is doing the job of a full marketing team: it starts with a CSV. 1. he exports all his existing ads from his ad platforms along with their performance metrics (click-through rates, conversions, spend, etc) 2. feeds the whole file into claude code 3. and tells it to find what's underperforming. claude analyzes the data, flags the weak ads, and generates new copy variations on the spot this is where he gets clever: he then splits the work into 2 specialized sub-agents: 1. one that only writes headlines (capped at 30 characters) 2. and one that only writes descriptions (capped at 90 characters). each agent is tuned to its specific constraint so the quality is way higher than cramming both into a single prompt so now he's got hundreds of fresh headlines and descriptions. but that's just the text. he still needs the actual visual ad creative, the images and banners that go on facebook, google, etc. so he built a figma plugin that: 1. takes all those new headlines and descriptions 2. finds the ad templates in his figma files 3. and automatically swaps the copy into each one. up to 100 ready-to-publish ad variations generated at half a second per batch. what used to take hours of duplicating frames and copy-pasting text by hand so now the ads are live. the next question is which ones are actually working. for that he built an MCP server (basically a custom integration that lets claude talk directly to external tools) connected to the meta ads API. so he can ask claude things like: • "which ads had the best conversion rate this week" • or "where am i wasting spend" and get real answers from live campaign data without ever opening the meta ads dashboard and the part that ties it all together and closes the loop: he set up a memory system that logs every hypothesis and experiment result across ad iterations. so when he goes back to step one and generates the next batch of variations... claude automatically pulls in what worked and what didn't from all previous rounds. the system literally gets smarter every cycle. that kind of systematic experimentation across hundreds of ads would normally need a dedicated analytics person just to track the numbers from the doc: ad creation went from 2 hours to 15 minutes. 10x more creative output. and he's now testing more variations across more channels than most full marketing teams a $380 billion company. and their entire growth marketing operation (not GTM) = just one person and claude code lol truly unbelievable