+ Hi, Pablo here +
+ ++
How I write some articles I have a hard time getting started with
++ I have a lot of shower thoughts. Way more than I can handle. Many times I feel like some of them + would make for a nice piece on my webpage, or I should make a personal note out of. But often times + they won't catch me in the right place and time to sit down, focus, and type them out. You have to + figure out the key points, lay out a plan, think about what you want to say and how, type it all + out, work on the text... It burns some calories. And sometimes it's enough friction to kill the idea + entirely. +
++ Recently I found a set of AI tools that allow me to capture some of these ideas and lower the + friction to get them on ink. My goal is not to have the AI write things for me, but just to quickly + drop a pretty decent first draft with very little effort, on the spot. With this, I've happily + rescued many good ideas from getting by falling through the cracks before I even hit my desk (or + getting ignored because I don't have the energy to go through it all). +
+Step one: recording myself
++ I'm self-hosting an open source audio transcription app called + scriberr. + It's just a fancy little webpage where you can drop audio and get a transcript. The neat bit is that + it also allows you to simply record on the spot. I used to host + Whishper, + but you had to first record then upload a file. I really liked it, but sadly I found that was + enough friction when rushing on the phone to not use it. I can access scriberr from my laptop, my + desktop, my phone, from anywhere basically. +
++ So anytime I feel like it, I can pull out my phone and start ranting about whatever topic is on my + mind. The recording gets sent to my server back home, and scriberr transcribes the whole thing into + text automatically. Transcription itself takes a bit because I'm not using a GPU, but I'm not in a + rush usually since the important thing is just to get the ideas out of my brain and into text easily. +
++ The transcript that comes out is usually quite decent in terms of accuracy. I'd say around 95% of + what I say gets picked up perfectly. The whisper models also do pretty decent in different + languages, so I can record in whatever I feel like at each moment. +
++ What's not great, in case you've never used transcription tools, is that the output is just a long + stream of words. The model tries its best at punctuation, but it's rather crappy. And obviously, no + paragraphs. Plus, with unprepared, spontaneous ranting, structure tends not to be top notch either. + Definitely not article-grade text out of the box. +
+Letting an LLM clean it up
++ But hey, those are not issues now that we have LLMs! I have a little script that fetches the + transcript results from my server to my laptop. Once I have my raw transcript locally, I just pass + it on to Claude, with a little prompt saying something like: "This is a transcript of me talking + about this and that. Process it for me, I want the output to be like XYZ." +
++ Sometimes I really just ask to have the transcript nicely formatted into paragraphs and proper + sentences, with the actual sentences being totally respected. Other times I already ask for some + restructuring of the ideas, so it's not just cleaning up the writing but actually shaping it into + something that resembles an article. It depends on how clear I was during my rant or what I'm really + planning to get out of it. +
++ After this bit, I'll either abandon the idea altogether because it wasn't as interesting as I felt + initially, or I'll really work properly in the text when I can and come up with something I'm happy + with. It will still take some desk time to get to a final result, but then the article is really my + writing and not a mix of my own slop with a layer of LLM slopification on top of it. I can't help + but think people who just copy paste LLM output and put their signature under it have little respect + for themselves and their reputation, and little love for the act of thinking and writing. +
+A great starter
++ And there you go. In just a few minutes, without having to focus deeply in front of a blank file, I + end up with a first version of my thoughts that I can already start polishing and thinking from. Not + all transcripts make it into clean texts in the end, but at least I ensure some of the ones which + would otherwise get lost do survive. The stuff that comes out of the LLM is not always great, to be + honest. Sometimes I'll change a lot of things from what I said in the audio. Sometimes I'll end up + adding a lot of stuff that I wasn't covering in my original rant. But the first draft helps me get + my thoughts out there and gives me something to begin with. +
++ And that's often all I need. +
++ +