The Radish Farm Stop opened a couple blocks from our house and it is great. Glad to see they are doing well. It made me think of SimCity when a new building is placed and the Sims start showing up. šŸ„³šŸ˜‚

I guess I’m getting my moneys worth for my $200 Claude Max account.

I went through the local Claude Code history on this Mac: 120 sessions and 254 subagent runs from Aug 6 to Sep 26, about 52k model calls. At API list prices that comes to about $13.7k. If you’re on a subscription, treat the dollar figures as a measure of how fast you use up your limits rather than a bill. Recent weeks run about $2.1–2.5k each.

There are obvious efficiency improvements for me to make. 😬

It still gives me a big grin when you open a model and then later go to your printer and there is the actual thing in real life as it were.

Easy mission: I will use all $250 of these free Claude “cloud session” tokens.

We watched Mayday on Apple TV tonight. Fun movie with plenty of action and good laughs. Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh were great in it.

This most recent issue of Arena all about Software looks really good. So much to dig into.

Weekly Thing Podcast Improvements

Claude and I did a session in WT Builder focused on the generated audio for Weekly Thing issues. This was one of the goals i had with the new authoring app.

  • Audio pauses will now fall in natural breaks in the flow. Each functional block of text is generated on its own.
  • Better section announcements and handoffs.
  • Blockquotes “quote” and “end quote” again.
  • Lists are spoken better.
  • I’m now embedding images from the issue into the metadata. If your podcast player supports that you will see them as the podcast plays.
  • Better pronunciation.
  • The descriptions now contain the links, so for the first time ever you can actually get to the articles from the podcast version.

With these changes the podcast version really can be a viable way to engage with the Weekly Thing.

The reward for sending the first issue of your newsletter after a 3-month summer break? More unsubscribes than usual. 🤪

Some screenshots of my WT Builder custom app to create issues of the Weekly Thing. This was fun to work on and will give me a great base to build off of as the Weekly Thing evolves.

I just published Weekly Thing 350 which is notably the very first issue to go through my new WT Builder app that I created with Claude. It worked pretty well and since it was first time on new code I told Claude to literally watch me use it on the server it was running on and fix things in realtime.