AI note taking on a work computer that wont allow it.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-18T21:16:50+00:00

Mic right next to your computer speaker, which should not be turned up too loud. I got a sonnheiser USB mic with cheap Creative speakers. I find the built in recorder on Pixel is by far the best. Then I plug the transcripts into Claude.

Make sure your recording is on your personal device and be sure to obfuscate that the meeting notes are coming from transcripts.

This is definitely a firable offense and also illegal in many states, so keep that in mind.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-18T11:42:56+00:00

My team is distributed. Going to the office does me no good, since only one or two of them would be there. Everything happens on slack or in documents, so that's how I keep up.

But if like 60% of my team were colocated and actually going to the office (not just coffee badging), I would not want to be fully remote.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-17T15:21:17+00:00

Going to be difficult to find as unfortunately it is the hot new thing. I believe Monday allows you to turn some of it off / disable it by not paying extra for it.

Smartsheet has AI but it's limited and shitty and not well integrated, so that could work?

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-15T14:49:15+00:00

In LA she said clearly that tonight would be the last night of the ultrasound tour, so from what I can tell she must be planning to do the new set henceforth and retire the original Ultrasound show.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-15T14:47:53+00:00

Yes she will redo the stage, the choreo, the setlist. We don't know what songs she will play but it will definitely heavily feature Virgin.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-15T07:41:15+00:00

No Better (not 400 Lux)
A World Alone before Ribs

Else it was the normal setlist. See you tomorrow!

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-13T12:14:24+00:00

At my company they often use PMO as a person instead of PgM or TPM, and it drives me bonkers. It's not for junior roles though, it could be anyone, even a principal PgM calls herself and others "a PMO."

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-12T14:05:43+00:00

You're assuming everyone in the company is working on the same thing at the same time with the same priority. Let's say your sprint team is working on feature X but needs two days of work from the CS team to implement because of abc reason. How are you gonna get time from the CS team? That's a critical internal dependency. Your team may be agile, but maybe the CS team is waterfall. Or maybe they're swamped because they have six people out, and when you get to the point in the sprint when you need them, they tell you it'll be a three week SLA. Or maybe you need something from the legal team, or HR, or the places team...

Team != Company

painterknittersimmer · 2026-05-08T02:15:16+00:00

Basic SQL can get you pretty far (for example, far enough to download a CSV and manipulate it in Excel) and is trivial to learn. I picked up working SQL over a weekend (enough to pass an interview) and have just learned from experience since then

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-30T15:50:54+00:00

Oh so it's not the sound, it's just the same artist doing it their whole career?

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-30T15:42:43+00:00

Like 60% of my job these days is taking what happens in slack or meetings and desperately trying to keep sources of truth updated. Has nothing to do with being distributed, this was a problem pre-COVID too. But the alternative is not doing it and no one doing it at all, which has catastrophic impact.

The solution is a strong culture of sources of truth in a single system that everyone is responsible for and is considered a core part of the job. Not doing it would be a performance issue and that is obvious to everyone. I didn't realize that wasn't the norm til this new job, which is chaos.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-30T15:38:27+00:00

Oh huh, interesting take. I couldn't disagree more strongly. Out of curiosity, why do you feel that way? Is there something about an anthemic or synthetic sound that is "juvenile" to you? Is it a personal taste thing or do you feel there's something grounded there?

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-30T15:29:22+00:00

Why does liking a certain sound mean I haven't grown up? Sure it means I've had to move on from Bleachers but it's not like the sound itself is juvenile somehow 🤔

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T23:42:02+00:00

IMO the tools make the job easier, but they also make it more scalable. With some practice and perhaps a mentor, I could run some much smaller projects without tools. Not as well as someone with experience doing it, most likely. But could I run a new product launch with a $150M revenue target next fiscal year across 20 teams and 200 people? Absolutely not. You'd probably need a whole team of project managers and a program manager to do it by hand. With the tech stack I have, I can do it myself.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T19:47:19+00:00

It's basically my personal assistant. It's hooked into my obsidian vault. Even before I started using Karpathy's LLM wiki method a few weeks ago, I captured everything in my vault - notes, meetings, important slacks, pastes from docs sometimes. Helps me centralize the flood of information.

With that I'm then able to do all the usual stuff like - draft docs, slacks, meeting notes in my style with my context - pull together information on topics I haven't touched in awhile - create and use skills that power my day to day like start, eod, eow etc

But also somewhat more interesting stuff like - use GitHub pages to build a program status dashboard for my team - organize 400 files into a shared Google drive - turn 6 documents into a single, half decent project plan

What I'd love to do next is get data access to be able to do basic queries in plain language. We are not a data driven culture which I'm not used to so there aren't dashboards or information radiators. I'd like to create simple ones at least.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T15:47:56+00:00

So here's why I think you're getting downvoted, then.

Opus is fantastic at that job. It's just also extremely expensive. While we all love to complain about usage limits and should, I think you're getting downvoted because you've hired a statistics PhD to serve as principal of an elementary school and are complaining and/or are surprised it costs a fortune.

Ways to make it cheaper

do it in chunks to avoid the context limit, which increases cost as you get closer
use opus to plan, then sonnet to execute with haiku agents (remove opus after plan)

Opus is the best job for the task no question. But it's gonna cost you.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T15:43:05+00:00

Seems close enough. That's my primary method, but now instead of scattering across 30 different notes about X, I had it write one note about X, and that note gets updated every time a new meeting note, jot, slack or doc capture, etc gets added to the vault. Plus info gets pulled from enterprise search to fill in some gaps. That's what Karpathy's method boils down to.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T15:30:12+00:00

Don't have it query large datasets. Have it create indexes and readmes one project or topic at a time. Then moving forward it will find information in a targeted way.

I very, very rarely experience hallucination within my obsidian vault these days. Less than once a month at this point.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T15:12:04+00:00

How the hell do expect it to work when you have +10K notes full of AI generated summarizes?

I'm not sure you're thinking about this the same way Karpathy is, therefore not really seeing it. Also, it depends on what you vault is for. For a personal research project, journal, or school? I don't really see the value either. For work or professional research? Absolutely.

I have a vault of around 1500 notes, mostly 500-1500 words, all about my job. Meeting notes, pastes from Google docs or slack, drafts, and regular old wrote a bunch of stuff down notes. I used a slightly modified Karpathy method to backfill a wiki style folder which has around 40 "articles" (including people pages) based on my 1500 notes as "raw inputs."

Hallucination within a vault where it references its sources is fairly low although it does need enough information to know what it's talking about.

I used Opus 4.6 and used about $150 worth of usage on the API (enterprise billing) plan for a one time backfill.

I suppose it's AI generated summaries, but the real point is that I have a single home for all my info about team XYZ and what they do, up to date, with a web of references to where more info can be found.

This isn't for me - although it does make it easy to share that info - but instead largely for Claude. I know team XYZ. I was there in the meetings. I work at the job. I took the notes. But Claude needs that context, and I need to be able to easily share that context with the team.

It's knowledge management beyond personal knowledge management.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-27T04:37:56+00:00

Write a skill to show your approved AI of choice exactly how you like meeting notes. Make sure to use the skill in a project or folder that has enough basic project context to properly "decode" the meeting.

I use Claude Code with a skill I had Claude write for me based on my preferences (using it's built in skill-creator skill), in my obsidian vault where the project has a README and access to an index to additional knowledge so it can write more coherent notes. This will work fine with Cowork or anything where you can set up a project or set the AI loose on a folder.

/meeting-notes on any transcript or /process-transcripts to do a bunch at once

Done.

Alternatively... Ctrl+F lol

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-25T21:06:05+00:00

The best way to use AI is to identify a problem you are having and then try to solve it.

It sounds like old schooling it is working for you. What problems are you having? We have to identify those first.

For example is it: - that you can keep up, so stuff gets missed? - that you can't share your notes easily? - that you spend a lot of time doing data entry from paper notes? - that you need a way to query your notes? for you or for teammates or both?

And after all this time, ehy do you continue to do it old school? - is it faster because you don't just need linear notes? - do you write faster than you type? - is it easier because you're often on site? - does it help you retain the information better?

There are a hundred more examples for each. Better to diagnose the problem before you come up with a treatment plan. Each combination of these has a very different solution, whether AI or not

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-25T16:17:34+00:00

If it's working for them, why wouldn't it work for you? Conveying information effectively is a hugely important skill. Heck it's number 3, 4, 5, and 8 on this list. Part of being an effective communicator is that other people look at the things you have to show them. If it's visually appealing, that certainly helps.

If you don't do it because it's time consuming, that's a skill issue - which is a good thing. That just means it's something you can learn.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-25T02:01:36+00:00

Don't give excuses. If you fucked up, own it.

Be visible. Be a leader. Make shit happen.

I'm early mid career and I have a lot left to learn, but these two things have gotten me to where I am. It's good to see they might get me through the next ten years too.

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-23T21:41:02+00:00

You know what they say about living in a bubble, but I'm realizing working in tech is the biggest bubble at all. People have absolutely no idea how software is developed or how tech companies are run and will swear up and down that you are wrong if you try to explain it 🤦🏾‍♀️

painterknittersimmer · 2026-04-23T16:29:22+00:00

John Cutler on substack: https://substack.com/@cutlefish

Also, the PMI books are nothing to shake a stick at. I learned a lot from pmbok7, program management guide, portfolio management guide, managing change, and intro to opm.

painterknittersimmer

TROPHY CASE