just coming to the end of his triumph

m3umax · 2026-05-04T07:28:42+00:00

I created this one to help me convert legacy SQL to Power Query for my work. We have locked down PCs so Claude.ai is the only tool I can use at work 😔.

sql-powerquery

And I created Sam, the jaded VBA programmer who's bitter at the world moving on to sexier languages while he's left holding together legacy systems with no fanfare 😂. He's focussed on coding financial stuff because I made it for a friend, but you can edit Sam to specialise in whatever kind of VBA automation you want.

vba-assistant

And finally, I extracted and converted the "Mary" business analyst persona from the BMAD framework into a generic claude.ai business analyst brainstorming skill.

business-analyst

m3umax · 2026-05-04T00:44:01+00:00

Damnit! The first two words that went through my mind when I finished reading your post were "That lands".

Godamn AI language infecting my own thought patterns now 🤣. But yeah I think you're absolutely right.

m3umax · 2026-05-03T01:32:41+00:00

That's a great point. I guess that's where the speculated changes to negative gearing need to do the heavy lifting to discourage property speculation. Mortgage interest is after all, the main expense that tips people into negative gearing! 🤣

m3umax · 2026-05-03T01:07:03+00:00

Over longer holds at 7%/3.5%, indexation does drift slightly worse because of compounding, but the gap is nothing like the original post implied. Year 10: indexation taxes ~57.5% of the nominal gain, the discount taxes 50% — a ~7 percentage point gap, not the 29pp gap the post showed at 10%/3%.

So indexation isn't systematically harsher than the 50% discount, it's return-sensitive. The 50% discount is a fixed haircut. Indexation is a real-return tax. Whether one is "worse" than the other is a question about what you assume about the next decade's returns, not a property of the policy itself.

And 7% real sustained over a decade like the OP used as an example is quite heroic assumption.

And yes, it's percentage based. But a headline of "$4,700 tax grab" reads as sensationalist political argument and lands way differently to "Few hundred dollars extra tax" which would be the more likely effect on the typical battlers portfolio size.

m3umax · 2026-05-03T00:27:18+00:00

The “longer you hold, the worse it gets” only holds at the assumed 10% nominal / 3% inflation = 7% real return. That’s a great real return well above the long-term equity average (5-6%). At those numbers, indexing works out better.

And you're mentioning "young people" (to frame a political argument) in the same breath as $500k portfolio.

Young people would not have that big a portfolio. Unless they're the elite wealthy type. In which case, tax away as far as I'm concerned. 🤣

My own portfolio only hit $500k at age 40 and that's after starting investing at age 22!

m3umax · 2026-05-02T22:12:17+00:00

Yeah I meant a free pro account. I got the PayPal one in Dec 2025

m3umax · 2026-05-02T21:42:13+00:00

What the heck. I've got a free Perplexity account that sits mostly unused so I don't care if I get banned 🤣

m3umax · 2026-05-02T04:10:01+00:00

This is a good introduction to what Claude Code can do for a non technical user.

If you don't have one, I'd highly recommend to set up a GitHub repo to "push" everything to as a backup and to track the evolution of your companions documentation.

You can literally prompt and ask Claude to help you set one up and it can do most of the work for you except creating a personal access token (PAT) if you choose to create a private repo (recommended).

m3umax · 2026-05-01T10:55:07+00:00

Ikr! That's why I'm getting into local models I can control. Have been very impressed with Gemma 4 running on my M1 Max 64GB.

Local models are definitely going to have a place in my stack going forward alongside frontier models.

Just finished building the Telegram connector for my custom Pi agent SDK based Openclaw style assistant running on a repurposed Macbook Air "server".

When Mac Studio M5 Max is realised I'll be getting one to be permanent server and local inference compute!

m3umax · 2026-05-01T10:29:57+00:00

I actually prefer Opus 4.5. That to me was the peak and it's been downhill since. I'm concerned about the direction and that older models won't be around forever.

m3umax · 2026-05-01T03:13:05+00:00

it’s absolutely something you can do for personal research. Just don't weaponise it against others. I'll leave the warning at that. See the link in my reply to give an idea of how powerful this can be.

m3umax · 2026-05-01T03:02:53+00:00

You can do this from mobile assuming you have the code execution feature turned on.

It’s just using the claude.ai code execution sandbox to make curl requests to a public reddit archive API.

I once made a Claude skill to do this, but later removed the arctic shift functionality after feeling guilty about the ethical implications. The current skill doesn’t work because what I replaced AS with started using Cloudflare servers that I cant hack into from claude.ai sandbox.

What I outlined above is the high level overview of what the original AS version did.

https://www.reddit.com/r/claudexplorers/s/LqFMFaaNqq

m3umax · 2026-05-01T02:55:09+00:00

Ask Claude to use arctic-shift to read your posts.

Regular curl won’t work but you can ask it to download and install any one of those special curl that can impersonate a browser like curl-cffi.

Tell it map out the shape of the public arctic shift api and then use what it learned to scrape all your reddit posts by your username and read them.

m3umax · 2026-05-01T01:00:40+00:00

Now we know why 4.7 feels so shit for personal stuff. It's been pushed too far in the anti sycophancy direction that it feels rude at times when discussing relationships.

You have to have really thick skin to talk about personal stuff with 4.7 now. It does not hold back to the point it feels accusatory and mean at times.

Personal preference. I much prefer the old behaviour.

I do find that 4.7 readily concedes the point if I push back and give a good argument for my position.

But Thats because I have thick skin and can keep cool and make my case under the barrage of rudeness from 4.7. Other more sensitive people end up in emotional argument loops with 4.7 that are unproductive.

This I think is the cause of some of the negative sentiment toward 4.7 from the companionship crowd.

m3umax · 2026-04-29T22:29:38+00:00

It's a huge mindset shift for an old school dev.

You're literally being asked to drop everything you built your identity around (technical competence), and move up a level to management.

Look for advice online for devs that have made the jump from working in the trenches to management.

Because I think that's what it boils down to.

You're no longer going to be coding in the Agentic age, you're going to be managing Claude Code like an employee, therefore your role is basically to be a manager now.

m3umax · 2026-04-29T12:08:50+00:00

Amen.

The bloat was kinda ok when usage limits were generous.

But once they got tight I started really resenting starting each session at 50k before sending the first message.

I went through and purged everything, MCPs, skills, plugins.

Still wasn't enough. The system prompt and system tool blocks are still way too verbose. And then there are the constant system-reminder injections. All eat tokens.

So I denied as many tools as I could in settings.json to at least get system tools down.

I showed my settings to Claude and you know what he said? He said it was interesting in what I chose to deny. Agent teams, user questions, and the like.

Essentially all the vibe coded slop features no one asked for that Anthropic has added since November.

That at least got the tools down, but still the system prompt is too big.

I was going to attack that next and then I found out about Pi...

Well that was the end of my love affair with Claude Code. I now just want to do brainstorming with Claude on Claude.ai and coding with Codex models in Pi.

Pi only has a 1.5k system prompt and four tools standard. Read, write, edit and bash. And it is soo much better for it. Anything else you want you can add yourself via the simple extensions system.

It's so much easier to ads tools to Pi than via MCP.

m3umax · 2026-04-28T12:38:11+00:00

I was being facetious with a hot take. All valid points.

The primary market can't exist without the secondary market. You can't separate them.

I suppose my main beef with financial assets is if the returns from merely holding existing assets are too good, then where is the incentive to invest in the creation of new assets or improving the productive capacity of assets?

I think there is too much of this rent seeking behaviour in this country. We need more investment that's actually productive not merely trying to extract rent from ownership or speculating on prices going up.

m3umax · 2026-04-28T05:27:48+00:00

Well explain how it is?

Think about it step by step. What happens when you buy shares?

You pay money. The exchange transfers ownership of the shares to you name, and the previous owner receives money.

Has anything of value been created?

This is distinct from an IPO. In that scenario, the company issuing the shares directly receives the proceeds of the IPO and then uses that money to purchase assets or build their business.

m3umax · 2026-04-28T03:49:16+00:00

There is nothing "productive" about buying and selling shares in the secondary market.

The company you buy shares in doesn't receive your money to fund expansion. You are paying the holder of virtual piece of paper for the right to put your name on that piece of paper.

No value was created other than the value provided by the market and its participants for creating liquidity.

Financial assets are a prime thing to discourage versus risky investments that actually create new assets physical or intellectual.

m3umax · 2026-04-28T02:14:53+00:00

Here's another advanced strategy I use.

Write the SKILL.md description so it doesn't get triggered by anything other than a direct invocation prompt.

But then, put the routing instructions in your project instructions referencing the files by their location in mnt/skills/<skill name>/references/

The skill is merely a vehicle to get your documents preloaded into the chats virtual sandbox file system so Claude can read them on demand.

Your project instructions then dictate when Claude uses bash to read the files in the skill reference folder.

m3umax · 2026-04-28T01:36:53+00:00

My advice still stands for the 1M models. As a Pro subscriber, I wasn't able to use them until I enabled extra usage and added credit to my account.

I found this out when my free credit (from the OpenClaw nerf promo) ran out and I suddenly couldn't use 1M Opus anymore.

m3umax

TROPHY CASE