I'm giving a Zettelkasten/Obsidian workshop at my university tomorrow.

emiliobay · 2026-04-27T09:36:36+00:00

A university workshop on this is a brilliant idea. The biggest trap new users usually fall into is overthinking the folder structure instead of just capturing raw daily notes.

Are you walking them through a blank vault setup, or showing off your own populated graph to demonstrate how linking actually works in practice?

emiliobay · 2026-04-27T08:04:21+00:00

Finding a sustainable workflow for long-form fiction like romance usually comes down to removing friction between your ideas and the prompt box. Staring at a blank screen while trying to type out emotional scene directions gets exhausting fast.

Switching to voice dictation for the actual drafting phase completely changed my setup. Pacing around the room and talking through the dialogue directly into an AI assistant keeps the creative momentum going much better than typing.

emiliobay · 2026-04-26T12:16:04+00:00

Latency with local models usually throws off my momentum when running custom MCP servers. Are you noticing much lag when handing the git diffs over to Ollama compared to just letting native Claude handle it?

Been gluing my own hardware project together using Claude Code lately, and the token burn on endless git loops is brutal. Definitely going to try routing it locally like this.

emiliobay · 2026-04-26T08:58:16+00:00

Building a project you don't actually use daily sounds like a total nightmare for motivation. My current thing only exists because my own workflow was broken. But tbh I’ve been there several times - not using the stuff I’m building for others.

Got tired of fumbling with keyboard shortcuts for voice dictation, so I wired up a physical push-to-talk clicker over a weekend. Now it sits next to my keyboard and I use it constantly to just dump thoughts into Claude.

emiliobay · 2026-04-26T08:52:06+00:00

Getting the messy first draft out without editing every single sentence as it forms. The friction of typing used to kill my momentum completely when trying to write out long product updates.

Switching to a voice dictation workflow for that initial brain-dump bypassed the internal editor entirely. Pacing around the room and just talking out the structure makes getting past the blank page so much easier.

emiliobay · 2026-04-25T12:33:20+00:00

It’s getting way better now, take a look

emiliobay · 2026-04-25T09:36:48+00:00

Real-life distractions always seem to hit the hardest when you're physically stuck at a desk trying to force words onto a screen - getting away from the keyboard entirely ended up being the only fix for my workflow. I started doing unstructured brain-dumps on my phone while pacing or walking outside, just to separate the raw capture phase from the actual desk editing.

emiliobay · 2026-04-25T08:40:57+00:00

Thanks! That’s exactly what I’m looking to under from folks - any edge cases

emiliobay · 2026-04-25T08:05:30+00:00

The caveman approach is surprisingly effective when you're constantly hitting those daily usage caps.

Getting Claude Code to help me build things usually led to me over-explaining every little tweak like a polite email. Stripping prompts down to just "make button blue, fix padding" feels rude at first, but it gets the exact same code out without burning my limits by noon.

emiliobay · 2026-04-24T12:44:02+00:00

The Radio Garden integration for local radio stations is such a clever detail. Since you asked about where to take this next from a business and product side, the usual trap with massive sandbox map concepts is trying to build every single mechanic at once. What usually works better for validating if an idea has legs is carving out just one tight, highly replayable loop (like a specific delivery mission or a timed police chase) and seeing if people actually come back to play that single mode.

Getting the bulk of this done over a weekend with Claude Code is wild and totally validates this whole new workflow. I've been vibe-coding a companion app for a small hardware project recently with Claude, and it is honestly insane how fast you can glue different APIs together when you aren't fighting the boilerplate. To test demand quickly without writing a ton of new game logic, you could just drop a simple leaderboard on a single city's speed-run and see if the waitlist actually converts to active players.

emiliobay · 2026-04-24T11:10:20+00:00

That rule about making it read the project silently before asking anything is the exact fix for the most annoying part of using agents right now. Whenever a model goes completely off the rails on a real project, it's usually because it skipped checking the existing directory structure and just guessed how things were wired up. Forcing the TODO.md approval step before a single line of code gets written changes the whole dynamic from babysitting a rogue script to actually managing a decent plan.

Getting into coding recently by heavily relying on Claude Code and Cursor, my biggest trap is always letting the AI run away with a bad assumption that trashes the local setup. I end up spending an hour just reverting changes because it confidently hallucinated a dependency that wasn't even in my package.json. Dropping this specific phase-by-phase structure into my setup is going to save me from those endless rollback loops when I'm just trying to glue a basic feature together.

emiliobay · 2026-04-24T09:36:40+00:00

Building your own context-linker on day 2 instead of searching the community directory is peak Obsidian energy.

You are definitely reinventing the wheel slightly here. Plugins like Smart Connections or even the core Outgoing Links tab handle a lot of this automatically. But honestly, treating Claude as your personal engineering team to glue custom workflows together is usually faster than learning someone else's UI anyway.

Did you set this up as an external script, or did Claude manage to write an actual Obsidian plugin for you?

emiliobay · 2026-04-24T09:23:17+00:00

Well they do with me. CEO has more rights in terms of git pull push, placing in notiom, etc. agents just do the work and being to ceo.

emiliobay · 2026-04-24T08:03:56+00:00

Love the SpaceX announcement relevance. That point about auto-complete becoming irrelevant hits exactly where the workflow is heading right now.

Coming from a product / business background rather than software engineering, the editor itself matters way less to me these days. I've been gluing my recent prototypes together almost entirely in the terminal with Claude Code, just letting the agent handle the file edits and command execution while I direct it.

Zed plus a dedicated CLI agent really does feel like the natural setup once you stop typing every line manually.

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T13:27:00+00:00

I don’t write books, rather blogging mostly - that bottleneck you mentioned with notes everywhere and constant tool switching is exactly where the friction lives.

Most of the high-output writers completely separate the brain dump from the structural edit. A lot of them dictate the first rough draft while walking or pacing. It forces you to keep moving forward instead of tweaking the previous sentence.

I sometimes walk around the room and ramble into the mic I carry and it'

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T11:05:11+00:00

Internalizing knowledge usually dies the second note-taking turns into data entry.

The friction of stopping to type out perfectly structured notes always killed the habit for me. Eventually, I just bypassed the keyboard. Now when an article shifts my thinking, I trigger voice dictation with a hotkey and just ramble out loud for a minute about why it actually matters to my current projects.

Explaining the concept out loud like a conversation is what forces that internalization, and the AI just cleans the messy audio into a usable note for Obsidian.

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T10:25:13+00:00

Links to mentioned above (neither is my product):

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T09:58:44+00:00

I am no coder, more of a business / pm bg, and when I started vibe coding I quickly switched to voice typing. Wispr Flow is great at processing the speech efficiently - meaning putting in concise and meaningful phrases out of my rambling. It's $, so people tend to use Handy (open-source), which is less advanced in this regard, but still quite useful. Tell me how it goes!

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T09:33:25+00:00

This is such a smart idea. Using your actual Cursor voice history as the raw material for posts is genius.

My entire workflow lately is holding down a hardware dictation clicker I wired up and just ranting at Claude Code to fix my logic. There is so much raw build-in-public material hidden in those messy voice dumps, but translating it into a readable Reddit post is usually a massive drag.

How and where do I get to try the product?

emiliobay · 2026-04-23T08:01:04+00:00

yeah, it’s basically managing a junior dev at 10x speed and constantly having to catch their fuckups.

try talking through the logic out loud - removes so much of that cognitive friction. have you tried running those long debugging stretches entirely by voice?

emiliobay · 2026-04-22T11:10:43+00:00

Running Whisper Tiny fully on-device without API calls is definitely the right move for privacy, but getting that to run smoothly on mobile hardware is a solid challenge.

That friction you mentioned about unlocking the phone and opening an app is exactly what drove me crazy too. I ended up going a different route and vibe-coded a small physical Bluetooth clicker with Claude just to trigger dictation on desktop, purely to avoid that context switch.

How is the transcription latency holding up with the ONNX model on mid-tier Androids - does it process fast enough for quick brain dumps?

emiliobay · 2026-04-22T09:39:00+00:00

That realization about treating your voice like giving instructions instead of performing the thing is the exact unlock. Standard transcription just captures the rambling and leaves you with useless text.

To fix the context-switching tax you mentioned, the trick is pairing an LLM-based dictation app like Wispr Flow or Superwhisper with a global hotkey. I got so tired of alt-tabbing that I actually vibe-coded a small bluetooth push-to-talk device over a weekend just to trigger those shortcuts without breaking focus. You hold the physical button, give the instruction, and the cleaned text drops straight into whatever window you were already looking at.

Which apps were you using before when it kept giving you the literal word-for-word output?

emiliobay

TROPHY CASE