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I work with long talking-head videos for my online course and Instagram. Turning them into vertical shorts used to take hours per video: finding the best moments, cropping to 9:16, adding captions, or paying for clipping subscriptions. I built a video-clipping agent as a Claude skill that runs entirely on free, open-source tools. Step-by-step: 1. I drop a long video—either talking-head footage or an already-produced 16:9 video—into a folder and invoke my "clipper" skill in Claude. 2. Claude transcribes the video locally with faster-whisper using word-level timestamps, so no API key is needed. ElevenLabs Scribe is an optional upgrade for tricky audio. Before transcription, the workflow cleans the audio with declipping and normalization because clipped microphone peaks can make Whisper skip words or hallucinate. 3. The skill scores every candidate moment against a rubric: hook strength (30 points), whether it can stand alone (25), emotional charge (20), rhythm (15), and ending (10). Only segments scoring 70 or higher survive, so I do not publish a weak clip simply because it exists. 4. Claude cuts the selected moments with word-level precision and reframes them to 9:16 in one of two modes: face-tracking crop for raw footage, or "pad" mode, which centers the full 16:9 video over a blurred background. The latter lets me repurpose already-edited videos without chopping off centered graphics or captions. 5. ffmpeg masters everything to a fixed specification: 1080x1920, 24fps, H.264 CRF18, and audio normalized to -14 LUFS. The files are ready for Instagram, TikTok, and Shorts. 6. I review the scored shortlist and publish the winners. What used to take hours—or require a monthly subscription—now takes minutes and costs zero. The scoring rubric also makes the agent explain why each clip deserves to exist instead of simply cutting wherever the waveform looks loud.

I spent twenty years producing documentary and nonfiction films, all of it the expensive way: crews, schedules, financing, and commissioners saying no. I'm proud of much of that work, and I still think about the films that never got made because the money wasn't there. Generative video pulled me in, but not for the reason people assume. It wasn't the speed or the cost. It was the fact that I could finally finish something without asking anyone for permission. No green light from a major platform. Nobody deciding that a story was too small to deserve a crew. A year later, I could produce this way. It turned out to be a different job rather than the same job with new tools. Then I ran into a problem I hadn't considered: how do you show the work? A finished shot doesn't prove much anymore. A client can look at a beautiful frame and have no way to tell whether it took three weeks or three minutes. If I'm honest, neither would I in their position. The thing every portfolio is built to display had stopped being evidence. I'm not a developer. I produce films. The site is bilingual, has seven sections, includes a case study for each film, plays video on hover, and has a comparison slider that works with a thumb as well as a mouse. I built all of it. I'd wanted this exact site for about fifteen years and had never managed to explain it properly to anyone I paid to make it. This time, I stopped explaining and built it myself. The middle of the page has a slider that you drag between the storyboard panel and the final shot. A basic before-and-after would prove nothing; you can fake that by generating twice. The storyboard is the proof because the framing, eyeline, and decision about what stays outside the frame all existed on paper before any model was asked to generate anything. You drag the handle and watch the intention survive. The rest of the site came from the same place. Video only plays on hover and is silent until you click for sound. Most video portfolios are unreadable because fifteen things start moving at once. The sections are organized by register rather than by client: epic, brand, animation, and lifestyle. A wall of logos answers who has hired you, which nobody is actually wondering. What they want to know is whether you can change tone. Nothing is cropped to fit the grid. A 5:33 film sits in 16:9 next to a 2:42 film in scope, and the layout is lopsided because of it. I nearly made them uniform because it looked tidier, then realized I was about to reformat my own films so a webpage would look neat. Anyone who cuts for a living spots that immediately. Concepts are labeled as concepts. Experiments have their own section instead of being scattered among the client work and hoping nobody asks which is which. Step-by-step: 1. I started from what my client couldn't verify: the craft behind a shot. 2. I found the artifact that proves it. It's usually the ugly thing nobody publishes: the storyboard, the reference sheet, or the version before the good version. 3. I put that artifact next to the finished piece inside one interaction, so nobody has to search for the proof. 4. I made playback deliberate. Video plays on hover, and sound requires a click. 5. I sorted the work by the question being asked rather than by the credentials I wanted to lead with. 6. I didn't reformat the work to fit the layout. I let the grid be uneven. 7. I labeled everything honestly: client, concept, or experiment. One word each can pay for the credibility of the whole page. 8. I wrote a brief for each section as a document first. Arguing with a paragraph is free; arguing with a built page is not. 9. I built the site with an AI coding tool. This was the least interesting step, even though it's the one everyone writes about. If your work can be mistaken for a lucky prompt, stop trying to prove it with the finished piece. The site is at www.termopilas.tv if you want to drag the handle yourself.

I produce cinematic AI video. What ruins a sequence is almost never image quality; it is drift. The face, jacket, and light change between shots, so what should read as one scene becomes a gallery of near misses. Most people fight this by regenerating until something matches. I built the opposite: a set of chained Claude skills that locks a character once and never lets the model improvise again. The lesson that started it cost me 72 credits in one unusable shot. I fed a finished POV frame as an image reference to “set the world” for a motorcycle sequence. The model treated it as a strong identity reference, cloned the entire cockpit from that frame, and ignored the bike I was describing in the prompt. Image references are read as identity, not atmosphere. That misunderstanding is why most people’s characters mutate. Step-by-step: 1. I lock the character before generating anything. I fill nine layers in order: identity and facial structure, skin realism, wardrobe and materials, emotional energy, environment, lighting scheme, camera language, vertical 9:16 framing, and a fixed block of negative instructions. A generic prompt returns a generic face. This is direction, not a portrait. 2. I shoot a character sheet: a neutral, multi-view image of the locked character on white. That sheet—not a pretty hero frame—is what I reuse as a reference from then on. 3. I expand coverage instead of reinventing the scene. One locked scene becomes a full shot list with hero angles, macro inserts, and establishing shots. The subject, wardrobe, weather, and lighting never change between prompts. Only the camera, focal length, framing, and distance change. Every prompt restates the entire world from scratch because the generator has no memory between images. Consistency comes from redundancy, not from the model remembering. 4. I time the story before animating. I create a 3x3 board with nine beats over fifteen seconds, with each panel showing its timecode, shot title, and action. The rule is strict: the character, wardrobe, world, and light stay identical across all nine panels; only the story advances. The emotional scale rises toward panel nine. 5. I generate with reference discipline. I pass the object or vehicle in a clean exterior shot as the only image reference, then describe the world, framing, and interior in text, repeating that description word for word across shots. I chain consecutive shots by feeding the last frame of one as the start image of the next. The joins are invisible. 6. I review the board against the renders, keep the shots that hold, and regenerate only the ones that drift. The result is that I stopped paying the regeneration tax. Shots are budgeted, not gambled, and a fifteen-second sequence holds together because it was blocked like a real scene—with coverage and continuity—before a single frame existed. The nine-layer character build and the coverage framework are adapted from two AI video courses plus twenty years of production. I learned the reference discipline in step five the expensive way.

I’m retired and in my early 70s. I never got into RPGs growing up, but I decided to try a tabletop RPG with my wife. The game I purchased included a rulebook and a PDF of the book. I wanted my wife and me to play as the player characters without either of us having to be the game master, so I tested whether AI could take on that role. I used ChatGPT to parse the PDF and walk us through the process. It helped us create our characters, Heisenberg and Felicity, and then started the game as the game master. We’ve only just started, but it seems like this is going to work well. The AI can keep secrets to itself, roll the dice when needed, and guide us through the adventure. Step-by-step: 1. I purchased a tabletop RPG that included a rulebook and a PDF of the book. 2. I used ChatGPT to parse the PDF and walk us through the process. 3. ChatGPT helped my wife and me create our player characters, Heisenberg and Felicity. 4. We had ChatGPT start the game as the game master so neither of us had to fill that role. 5. We began playing while ChatGPT kept secrets to itself, rolled the dice when needed, and guided us through the adventure.

Sometimes a story needs a simple locator map to show where something happened or where something can be found—such as a business facility, a car accident, or the best place to see a sunset. I've worked in media for a long time and understand the power of maps to tell stories. But media cost-cutting and consolidation have reduced the number of available graphic departments, so creating a map is often the last task a reporter or editor wants to take on. I used Perplexity for initial research, Claude Code and Codex to build a web app, and Perplexity and ChatGPT for post-work such as SEO best practices. Step-by-step: 1. I used Perplexity's Deep Research mode to conduct a competitive market analysis. I asked it to analyze the field I was considering entering, identify competitors and growth rates, and explicitly break out feature sets. 2. I revised the research with my own idea and asked Perplexity to run the competitive landscape against it. I also provided desired outcomes, including intended audiences and where competitors were reaching them. I added the constraint, "Do it without syncophancy," so it would stop telling me how good my potential product was. 3. I hand-drew the initial screens and functions I wanted, then used the `/office-hours` skill in the Gstack bundle, available on GitHub, to play devil's advocate, sharpen the ideas, and challenge my assumptions. 4. I wrote a long prompt describing the product, starting broadly with the concept and audience and then narrowing to specific features and benefits. For example, I specified that it should export in 16:9 and 9:16 formats so maps would be ready for mobile vertical presentation. 5. I specified the hosting environment and that the product should be a web app. I also required a planning phase followed by construction phases. I pasted the prompt into Claude Code with this final line: "Use /grill-me to ask me questions to clarify intent." After 147 questions, it started the build. 6. This was in the pre-Fable days, so I specified that Opus 4.8 should act as an orchestrator while less expensive agents, particularly in Codex, handled the actual coding. 7. I used separate phases for technical work such as wiring in mapping providers and getting the UX to work correctly. Other phases included wiring in payment and subscriptions and making sure a subscription triggered an email campaign with instructions. 8. I dedicated an entire phase to building admin tools so I could manage the marketing language on the landing page and publish blog entries. 9. After each phase, I had the Opus/Codex combination perform an adversarial code-review-and-fix cycle. I then ran the `/ai-regression-testing` skill from the ECC repository on GitHub to catch issues the code review missed. 10. After every third phase, I prompted Claude Code: "Act as a senior QA engineer and go through the entire codebase looking for inconsistencies, functions that are in the wrong place, code that is overkill and security vulnerabilities." 11. When I had a product I thought was ready for testing, I prompted Claude Code, again using the Opus/Codex combination: "Act as a senior security engineer. Run this against OWASP standards. Find problems and suggest fixes. Harden this product overall." 12. As I neared the end, I asked Perplexity Deep Research and ChatGPT (Sol/High) to find SEO solutions for the product.

Ten days ago, I posted about keeping a `HANDOFF.md` so an AI film project doesn't lose the decisions it has already made. This is the other half, and it turned out to be the expensive one: the decisions that haven't been made yet. Credit where it belongs: Tony Ojeda posted a spec-generator agent that sits between an idea and implementation. The rule I borrowed is his: the agent inspects what already exists before proposing anything. I applied it to film production instead of code. I pointed an agent at my production documents for a short film I hadn't started generating and asked it to identify what was still undecided, what each item affected, and what would break if it were decided late. It came back with ten open decisions. One of them was worth the whole exercise. My environment description is locked verbatim across all 40 shots so the world stays identical. The film is called *The Thaw*. Whether the ice visibly melts during the film is written down nowhere. If I decide that in week three, all 40 keyframes get regenerated at once. I would have found out around shot 12. The counterintuitive part is who writes the list: not me. Asking the person who already has the whole film in their head what's missing gets you very little, because they have all of it—and that's exactly why they can't see the hole. The list has to come from something that only knows what's written down. Step-by-step: 1. I put the open questions in section 0 of the handoff, above everything else, so it's the first thing read and the first thing emptied. 2. I have the agent write that list, not me. It reads every existing document for the project and returns only what it cannot know from them. 3. I have it return three things for each item: what's undecided, which shots it affects, and what breaks if it's decided late. The third column sets the priority. 4. I have it sort by what costs the most to change afterward, not by what's easiest to answer. 5. I keep one hard rule: while an open question affects a shot, that shot doesn't get generated. The question gets decided, or deferred in writing with the cost of being wrong stated. 6. Every answered item leaves section 0 through one of two doors: into the closed canon or into the rejected list. Nothing is simply deleted. 7. I ask specifically about the things that go missing every time: the rule of the world; the physical scale of anything impossible, such as whether the character can touch or climb it; any object appearing in more than one shot; screen direction; how it ends; who speaks and in what voice; and the delivery format. 8. When it finds nothing real, it says so. A list padded to look thorough is worse than an empty one. The version I'd used for a year ran at the end of a session and recorded what got decided. Running it at the start, focused on what hasn't been decided, is the same document pointed the other way—and it's the direction that saves money.

“A good engineer knows when not to use AI.” I built a semi-automated workflow to summarize my live streams. With it, I can record and edit a stream in just one day of work. Not everyone has time to watch an entire stream, so creating a summary of the main moments is important for people who want to watch it later. Many tools create Shorts from videos by analyzing transcripts, but they are expensive and do not work well for visually heavy content such as gameplay. Gemini can analyze both video and audio and has a long context window, so I decided to use Google AI Studio to identify important moments. I also created scripts to automate parts of the video-editing process. Some of the scripts can be executed by an agent, and the prompts can be turned into Skills when using the API. Step-by-step: 1. I record the video with separate tracks for the microphone and background audio. I keep the microphone on the first track so the LLM does not identify only the background audio. 2. I compress and cut the video with `ffmpeg`, then extract the audio tracks. Google AI Studio has implicit video requirements: files must be under 400MB and under one hour long. The AI analyzes only one frame per second, so I can also lower the FPS to save space. I use the audio tracks later in the workflow. 3. I upload the processed videos to Google Drive, which makes them easier to use in Google AI Studio. 4. I use Gemini with temperature 1 and a high thinking level to select the important moments. I add the system prompt and specify which part of the video I am uploading: "The video is part X of the stream. Please make a structured script according to the system instructions." This helps Gemini understand what types of moments may appear in the video. The system prompt was created for gameplay presentations but can be adapted for other content. 5. I use Gemini Pro with temperature 1 and a high thinking level to find the timestamps for the selected moments. I keep timestamp generation separate from moment selection so Gemini has more thinking time for each task. Gemini Pro works better than Flash when handling time. I add the system prompt along with a copy of the response from the previous step. - As an extra check, after execution I continue the conversation with: "Check if the analysis was cut off too early (context truncation), ignoring that the video continued and generating false positives for timestamps. Check the last events especially." 6. I send the data to Blender. I create a JSON file containing the AI’s response and use a script to add the original video, the microphone track, and the background audio track. The script cuts and marks the important moments based on the JSON. Because it is not possible to send multiple audio tracks from a single video, I send the tracks separately. I also make sure to use the correct FPS, either 30 or 60. 7. I edit the video manually. The AI’s timestamps are not perfect, so I may add or remove sections, or correct a position that the AI identified incorrectly. I then render the video. 8. As an extra, I can automate standardized edits. For example, I use three different camera positions, so I add clips to three different tracks depending on the position I want. I use a script to change the position and scale of the clips on those tracks. 9. As another extra, I transcribe the audio. I mute the background audio and save only the microphone audio as an MP3, then use Whisper to transcribe it. I can use the transcript as YouTube subtitles or embed it directly into the video. I use Whisper-WebUI with Log probability Threshold -0.5, No Speech Threshold 0.5, Patience 2, and Hotwords `\u003cmy name and terms in other languages I usually use\u003e`. I use an LLM to translate the transcript into other languages. 10. Finally, I create tags and titles. I upload the transcript to Google Drive and use it in Google AI Studio with a system prompt to generate tags and titles for the video. I also use the assistant in Google AI Studio to analyze and summarize my channel for use in LLMs. This helps me choose better titles and tags.

I set up an AI assistant to run my entire writing business on autopilot. Every morning, it pulls RSS feeds from more than 30 AI and writing sources, deduplicates them against the previous day’s digest, curates the top items, and sends me a single Telegram message with numbered, linked items before I wake up. At 11 a.m. each day, it generates an original writing craft post. The topic comes from a rotation pool of more than 15 categories, and the assistant avoids anything used in the last 30 days. It also creates accompanying artwork in a rotating fine-art style, then cross-posts the content to Facebook, X, and my blog, including the featured-image upload to WordPress. Each week, it compiles and sends an email newsletter to my subscriber list through Brevo. It pulls from a curated candidates file that I approve before the newsletter goes out. Behind the scenes, the assistant manages a fleet of five servers, including servers for my wife, daughter, and two business colleagues. It handles daily backups, monitors costs across providers, and reminds me when context windows are becoming expensive. The key insight wasn’t the automation; it was the partnership model. My assistant has a persona file (`SOUL.md`) that defines how it communicates, a memory file (`MEMORY.md`) with everything it needs to know about my life and business, and a playbook of behavioral rules built from real mistakes over time. It pushes back on bad ideas, flags risks before executing, and has genuine opinions about craft and content. That shift—from “tool you talk to” to “colleague who has your back”—is what I wrote my book about. *Harnessing the Machine* is the field guide I wish I’d had when I started. It isn’t a tutorial, because the technology changes weekly; it’s a guide to building a working relationship with something that remembers yesterday. The tech stack is OpenClaw, GLM-5.2 as the primary model, DeepSeek V4 Pro as the fallback, and AWS Lightsail. The total monthly cost is under $30. The real cost was calibrating the assistant: teaching it what I care about, what “good” looks like, and when to ask versus when to act. That’s the part most people skip, and it’s why most “AI automation” posts feel like demos rather than relationships. Tools used: OpenClaw, GLM-5.2, DeepSeek, Telegram, WordPress, Brevo Step-by-step: 1. I configured OpenClaw with a persona file (`SOUL.md`), a memory file (`MEMORY.md`), and a behavioral playbook built from real mistakes. 2. I connected it to RSS feeds from more than 30 AI and writing sources and had it deduplicate, curate, and send a numbered Telegram digest each morning. 3. I created a rotation pool of more than 15 writing categories and instructed it to avoid topics used in the previous 30 days. 4. I scheduled it to generate a daily writing craft post, create artwork in a rotating fine-art style, and cross-post the result to Facebook, X, and my WordPress blog with a featured image. 5. I set up a weekly Brevo newsletter that pulls from a curated candidates file I approve before sending. 6. I connected the assistant to five servers, including servers for my wife, daughter, and two business colleagues, and had it manage daily backups, provider costs, and expensive context windows. 7. I configured GLM-5.2 as the primary model, DeepSeek V4 Pro as the fallback, and AWS Lightsail as the hosting environment. 8. I calibrated the assistant by teaching it my standards, what “good” looks like, and when to ask for approval versus acting on its own.

My first media job was as a fact-checker at a major magazine. Those jobs have already mostly vanished before AI arrived, but now I use ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking as a last-pass fact-checker on my newsletters before I hit send. I'll ask it to identify inconsistencies, isolate the assertions that most need verification, and check key numbers, quotes, and factual claims against original or primary sources. In other words, it does not replace reporting, but it is remarkably good at stress-testing a draft before publication — essentially fact-checking my fact-checking. Step-by-step: 1. I pasted the nearly finished newsletter draft into ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking. 2. I asked it to identify inconsistencies and isolate the assertions most in need of verification. 3. I had it check key numbers, quotes, and factual claims against original or primary sources. 4. I reviewed the proposed corrections and followed the source trail rather than accepting changes blindly. 5. I used the result as a final stress test of my own reporting and fact-checking before publishing.

For a recent video, I needed to animate a visual representation of this ancient board game. Doing that manually in After Effects would've taken a few hours, so instead I described the rules of the game to Claude and asked it to generate an interactive SVG animation. After a few rounds of tweaking, I was able to screen-record the result, and it worked great for the video. Step-by-step: 1. I described the ancient board game’s rules and the visual sequence the audience needed to understand. 2. I asked Claude to generate an interactive SVG animation that demonstrated the game. 3. I reviewed the first version and gave feedback on the motion and clarity. 4. I repeated the prompt-and-tweak loop until the sequence worked for the video. 5. I screen-recorded the finished SVG animation and used the recording in the edit.

Post-production for each of my podcast episodes used to be a significant task, even when an episode was audio-only. I’ve now built a workflow with Claude and Descript to automate the production process. I clean up the original recording in Descript, export the transcript to Claude, and run a single command to generate the remaining assets. This includes show notes for Hello Audio, opening and closing scripts written in my voice using anti-AI files to avoid a robotic tone, audio clips and audiograms for social platforms through a custom Claude skill, teaser posts for each audiogram on LinkedIn, and launch-day posts for LinkedIn and Substack, where my audience is. I’m sure there’s a way to streamline the workflow further to include distribution of the posts, audiograms, and episodes. It’s a work in progress 😀 Step-by-step: 1. I clean up the original podcast recording in Descript. 2. I export the transcript from Descript to Claude. 3. I run a single command in Claude to produce show notes for Hello Audio. 4. I generate opening and closing scripts for each episode using my voice and anti-AI files to avoid a robotic tone. 5. I use a custom Claude skill to automate the production of audio clips and audiograms for social platforms. 6. I create teaser posts for each audiogram on LinkedIn. 7. I prepare the main LinkedIn and Substack posts for each episode’s launch day. 8. I’m continuing to look for a way to streamline distribution of the posts, audiograms, and episodes.

I’m researching two separate documentary films. For each project, the bot runs three web crawls and one health check every day. Based on my notes, scripts, and other existing initial research, it identifies research domains by theme and media type, favoring audio and images while applying a higher threshold to other documents. Anything scoring eight or higher is logged in Notion and downloaded automatically when possible. The bot cycles through different themes, and the health check adjusts the similarity threshold based on the results. If many items score eight, it may log and download only nines. If fewer qualifying items appear, it may begin downloading sevens. Most items cannot be downloaded because they are inaccessible to the bot, but they are still logged and linked. I review the items in Notion and mark each one according to criteria such as “people only for research” or “reject—permissions required.” It isn’t a full replacement for professional archival research, but I feel it’s getting me 90% of the way there. As an independent filmmaker, this is a huge benefit. Each morning, it sends me a synopsis, and each week, it sends me a list of pre-written emails to send to archives that require human interaction. Step-by-step: 1. I provide the bot with my notes, scripts, and existing initial research for each documentary project. 2. For each project, the bot runs three web crawls and one health check every day. 3. It identifies research domains by theme and media type, with a preference for audio and images and a higher threshold for other documents. 4. It logs items scoring eight or higher in Notion and automatically downloads them when possible. 5. It cycles through different themes and uses the health check to adjust the similarity threshold: it may focus on nines when many eights appear, or begin downloading sevens when fewer qualifying items appear. 6. It logs and links items that cannot be downloaded because they are inaccessible to the bot. 7. I review each item in Notion and mark it according to criteria such as “people only for research” or “reject—permissions required.” 8. Each morning, I receive a synopsis, and each week, I receive pre-written emails for archives that require human interaction.

I built a repeatable, human-directed AI workflow for turning an original emotion, memory, or story into a finished WazWorld song, complete with cover artwork and release content. It addresses one of the biggest problems with AI music: a simple prompt can produce something technically impressive but generic, overproduced, or disconnected from the creator’s real intention. The workflow begins with a human trigger—an experience, relationship, place, mood, or musical idea that I genuinely want to express. WazWorld generally moves between dark alternative/electronic music and California coastal country-rock. Step-by-step: 1. I create a detailed artistic brief describing the song’s emotional core, story, genre, energy, vocal character, instrumentation, arrangement, dynamics, and intended listener experience. 2. I work with ChatGPT to develop and challenge the concept, write and rewrite lyrics, remove clichés, and design the full arrangement. This includes the intro, verses, choruses, instrumental passages, transitions, musical peaks, and outro. ChatGPT also helps translate my direction into precise production language and exclusions that Suno can understand. 3. I generate versions in Suno, treating each result as a demo rather than a finished song. I evaluate the vocal delivery, lyrics, bass, guitars, synths, drums, tempo, arrangement, and emotional impact. Then I make targeted prompt changes and generate new versions. A song may go through dozens of iterations before it sounds the way I originally heard it in my head. 4. After selecting the final music, I use ChatGPT and AI image generation to develop cover artwork that matches the song’s emotional identity. I adapt the artwork for streaming, YouTube, Instagram, Stories, and Shorts, then create the metadata, descriptions, captions, and promotional material needed for release. 5. I distribute the finished music through services such as DistroKid and publish it across streaming and social platforms. The final result is not a one-click AI song. AI provides creative and production tools, but I direct every major decision—from the original emotion and lyrics to the arrangement, instrumentation, vocals, artwork, and release strategy. Someone can recreate this workflow by starting with a clear human idea, documenting the desired sound, generating multiple versions, evaluating each one like a producer, and iterating until the finished work communicates the original intention.

Create an immersive 3D website for artists with an AI avatar that welcomes visitors, answers questions about the artist and artwork in real time, and presents the work throughout the virtual gallery. Step-by-step: 1. Build or download a 3D environment using Claude Code or another suitable development tool. 2. Upload the artworks into the 3D environment. 3. Create a digital avatar, optionally using Adobe Mixamo (free), and import it into the scene. 4. Connect the avatar to an AI language model so it can interact naturally with visitors and answer questions about the artist and the artwork. 5. Give the avatar the ability to point to, manipulate, or present artworks during conversations. 6. Write a detailed artist biography and a description of each artwork. Use this content as the AI avatar’s knowledge base so it can provide accurate, engaging responses. 7. Use open-source voice technologies through Pinokio to enable realistic speech synthesis and voice interaction. 8. Arrange the artworks throughout the 3D environment and optionally display videos on the gallery walls. 9. Configure the audio system so multiple videos do not play sound simultaneously. Audio should activate only when a visitor approaches or interacts with a specific artwork or video. 10. Configure collision detection so the avatar cannot walk through walls or other obstacles. For example, stop the avatar whenever it encounters an obstacle higher than approximately 60 cm (24 inches). 11. Optimize the experience for the web and deploy the website using FileZilla and OVH hosting. 12. Pay special attention to iPhone and iPad compatibility. Apple devices are more sensitive to large assets and memory usage, so it may be necessary to create separate optimized versions for iOS and Android, using compressed models, textures, and videos to ensure smooth performance.

An AI agent scrapes book marketplaces for recent releases, crawls the web for the corresponding authors’ email addresses, and generates customized marketing pitches based on the authors’ own book descriptions. Just kidding—I’m an author, not an agency. I receive about half a dozen such email pitches every day. I added a spam rule that looks for the text "your book" and sends those messages to spam because my email host obviously isn’t using a smart enough AI-based spam filter. Step-by-step: 1. An AI agent scrapes book marketplaces for recent releases. 2. It crawls the web for the corresponding authors’ email addresses. 3. It generates customized marketing pitches based on the authors’ own book descriptions. 4. I receive about half a dozen of these pitches every day. 5. I use a spam rule that looks for the text "your book" and sends the messages to spam.

I built an episode with the wrong voice. It was not a bad take; it was the voice of a different project entirely—a narrator I had cloned for another series months earlier. Nothing in my files identified which voice belonged to which show, so the assistant picked the one it had seen most recently. I did not catch the mistake until the mix. That is what working with agents on anything long actually costs you: not bad output, but amnesia. Every session starts cold, so settled decisions get reopened, undocumented rules get broken, and the same argument returns every week wearing a different hat. I run several short-form historical and science-fiction series at once, and they all survive on one file each. It is not documentation or a spec. It is what film crews have used for a century: a series bible combined with a daily production report, pointed at an agent instead of a hundred people. I use one Markdown file, read at the start of every session and updated when the session closes rather than when it opens. Four sections do the work: Step-by-step: 1. Closed canon: Each decision includes its reason. Mine says the opening shot is never a contemplative establishing shot. It opens mid-action, with the text hook on screen by the first second, and the beautiful wide shot comes second as the breather. I write the reason next to the decision because the plan for the current episode came back with that wide shot opening the sequence, and I had to reorder it again. The decision alone stops nothing; the reason keeps the rejected version from returning. 2. Rejected list: I record what was already tried and exactly why it was dropped. The wrong voice lives here now as one line: never reuse assets across projects without confirming. This is half the value of the document, and it is the half almost nobody writes. 3. State table: I track each item, its known defects, and the decision already made about it. Mine currently reads: lips at 62.5 to 63.5 seconds, native voice at 64.1 to 65.6, voice moved forward and the original position ducked. A defect written down with its fix is an instruction. A defect nobody records is work you pay for twice. 4. Next three actions: I list concrete next steps, each naming the file it touches. Never “keep going.” Step-by-step: 1. Create `HANDOFF.md` at the root of the project before any real work starts. 2. Write the goal, deadline, and delivery constraints. Anything external that forces your hand goes here instead of staying in your head. 3. Add every consequential decision to the canon, along with its reason and what broke with the alternative. 4. Whenever something is tried and rejected, add a row to the rejected table. It takes fifteen seconds and can save an afternoon. 5. Maintain a state table of the real items, including their defects and agreed fixes. 6. Close every session by updating only three things: the state, the new rejections, and the next three actions. 7. Open every session with: “Read `HANDOFF.md` in full before proposing anything. The canon and rejected list are not up for discussion. Verify the real state against the files, then tell me where we are in two lines.” The discipline that makes this work is updating the file when you close a session, not when you open one. At the end of a session, you still remember why you made the decisions. The next morning, you do not—and neither does the agent. The template is at the bottom. It costs nothing and it is a text file.

A finished video can be wrong in ways you cannot see—not because of the edit, but because of the delivery file itself. That is what gets work sent back, and it is rarely the craft. I built a delivery check for this. I give it a finished file, tell it where the file is going and what kind of piece it is, and it measures the things that cause rejections: sample rate, mono audio, integrated loudness against the destination target, true peak, dynamic range against a band rather than a single number, A/V drift, whether the shots cut together, and whether the file can stream before it has finished downloading. Most of those checks are for sound, because most of what gets sent back is sound. Picture problems are visible on a screen. A file that is 2 dB too quiet or peaks at -0.7 dBFS can look perfect and still come back. For everything it can fix, the checker gives me the exact `ffmpeg` command, with the numbers already calculated for that file. It does not merely describe the fix, and it does not hand me a corrected file. That was the decision that mattered. A fixer is a black box. You never learn that you had a problem, so you make it again the following week. Then, when your editing tool adds an “optimize on export” button, you have nothing. An inspector that explains the problem in one sentence and gives you the command teaches you the standard once and remains useful when the tools change. Three things determined whether I would actually use it, and none of them are checks. “Two severities, never one.” Something either bounces, or it needs your eyes. A tool that only says “bad” gets ignored on the third run, because half of what it flags is a decision you made on purpose. Sample rate, mono, and true peak bounce without argument, and they get a command. Loudness and dynamic range need to be reviewed first. My dynamic-range check says in plain words that the result is often deliberate and should be fixed at the source rather than in the master. “A check that refuses to give a verdict.” On vertical video, the platform interface covers the bottom 26 percent and the top 12 percent. I flag high-contrast elements in those zones but deliberately do not fail them, because the detector cannot tell a caption from a bright patch of sky. The report explains that limitation. A check admitting what it cannot know is what makes the checks that do commit worth trusting. “The thresholds are mine; the code only applies them.” They live in a table: destination crossed with content. Social wants -14 LUFS, a festival master wants -18 with a wider tolerance because festivals provide a band rather than a number, and broadcast wants -23. A scripted short is allowed to be denser than a screencast. That table is the whole product. For example, to catch shots that do not cut together, I measure the luminance range across the piece. The first version used average brightness per frame and kept flagging legitimate night photography. A fade to black has nothing bright in it; a night scene does—a streetlight, a moon, or a face. Changing the discriminant to the brightest pixel in the frame instead of the average eliminated the false positives. That took ten minutes of thinking, and no amount of better code would have found it. Step-by-step: 1. I wrote down what had actually gotten my work sent back over twenty years before writing any code. I captured the scars rather than making a spec sheet; that list became the product. 2. I gave every check a severity: it bounces, or look before you send. Anything I could not confidently put in one bucket became informational, with no verdict at all. 3. I made every check return four things: the measured value, pass or fail, why it matters in one plain sentence, and, where possible, the command that fixes it. 4. I put the thresholds in a profile table instead of hardcoding one standard, because -14 LUFS is right for social and wrong for a festival. 5. I added a parameter for whether the file is my own master or a copy pulled from a platform. On a downloaded copy, half the container checks measure someone else’s transcode rather than my work, so they are skipped and the report explains why. 6. When two fixes would collide, I output only one command. If loudness already needs a gain change, the limiter goes inside that command instead of being offered separately; otherwise, I would run two instructions that fight each other. 7. I tuned the checker against real files until the false positives stopped. Ignoring the top and bottom five percent of frames eliminated the ones caused by a single stray frame. 8. I made the output a report. I read it, decide, and run the command myself. The functions are an afternoon of work, and anyone can copy them. What is not written down is the list of what to check, at what threshold, and why.

I built an interactive AI recommender for Medium publications and packaged it as a Gemini Gem. Medium writers who want their articles to be discovered can submit their pieces to a publication, which is like a digital magazine focused on a specific topic. However, there are hundreds of publications, so it can be difficult to find the right one for a particular article. A key resource is "Medium's Huge List of Publications Accepting Submissions." It contains basic information about each publication, but the list is difficult to navigate because of its size. My solution was to organize that information and use it as the source for an AI recommender. I packaged the system as a Gem because the interface is cleaner, and users do not need to see the sources I used. Step-by-step: 1. I asked Gemini to compile and format basic information for each publication, including its topic, size by number of followers, and a short description. 2. I consolidated that information in a Google Sheet. 3. I used the spreadsheet as a source for a Google Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). 4. I added instructions for the AI, like the following: "You are an expert guiding the user to find the ideal publications for their articles in Medium. Ask the user to write down what their interests, topics, etc., are; whether they are beginner writers; whether they want to start with a small publication (less than 1,000 followers), mid-size (a few thousand), or only the biggest (tens or hundreds of thousands). Ask them for any other personal information and details about their writing, and take that into account." 5. I packaged the system as a Gemini Gem instead of distributing it as a Notebook so users could access it through a cleaner interface without seeing the sources. It can be accessed at the following link: https://gemini.google.com/gem/1HDPzcE6Jls76V4I2tFZhIn-SbeeDe-_-?usp=sharing

I have been testing Perplexity Computer, and it really makes you rethink a lot of workflows. It has been particularly useful for surfacing interesting and viral social content across X and Reddit, with internet search abilities that seem much more capable for quick canvassing of different platforms. I have also used it for clipping and captioning video content for social, with Computer able to find, transcribe, give recommendations on the most viral quotes/sections, and caption in just minutes — a wild process that would normally take me (with little video experience) much longer and have to leverage a ton of different apps to make happen. Step-by-step: 1. I used Perplexity Computer to canvass X and Reddit for interesting social content with signs of viral momentum. 2. I narrowed the results to the posts and videos worth developing further. 3. I had Computer find and transcribe the source video content. 4. I asked it to recommend the strongest quotes and sections for short-form clips. 5. I used the same workflow to clip and caption the selected sections in minutes.

I built a band scraper to identify bands on Bandcamp, interact with them, and offer mixing and mastering services. A daily cron job runs an Apify Bandcamp scraper, stores the data, and supports a website hosted on Lightsail. Step-by-step: 1. I configured an Apify Bandcamp scraper to collect band data. 2. I scheduled the scraper to run daily with a cron job. 3. I stored the collected data. 4. I used the data to interact with bands and offer mixing and mastering services through a website hosted on Lightsail.