Po-Wei Chen, MD Po-Wei Chen, MD

I previously shared building a money-saving dashboard for AI. Back then, I was mostly looking at “how much money I spent.” Using it now, I realized what really hurts isn’t the money, it’s the quota: Claude Code’s subscription has 5-hour and 7-day rolling windows. Hit the limit, and it just stops dead in its tracks. In this post, I’ll share the open-source little tool we made for this: claude-pacer (github.com/drpwchen/claude-pacer). Why build this? It started with getting cut off in the middle of the night a few times. ...

This is an article that I’ll keep updating. ...

The previous post, Getting Started from Scratch, was about how to install it and get it running. This post is about using it well. And that is completely different from just getting it to run. I’ve found that what really determines the outcome isn’t which model you use or whether you can code. It’s how you delegate tasks and how you set up guardrails. The stuff in this post isn’t tied to a specific tool; it applies even if you use ChatGPT (I’ll explain the differences in the last section). ...

Why “too many notes” and “no notes” are the same thing Let me start with a rule I decided on early and haven’t changed since: in my note vault, there can only be one note per topic. It’s not about being a neat freak. It’s because if the same thing is covered in five different places, I have to open five files when I look something up, and figure out which version actually counts. That organization work didn’t disappear, it was just left intact for my future self. And my future self is usually seeing patients in clinic or rushing to finish slides, with no time to do this. The chaos caused by too much information is the exact same pain as not having enough information. ...

I was recently preparing an introductory AI lecture for our therapist colleagues, and thought I’d put together an advanced list of all the tools I normally use and the programs I’ve written. This way, when you want to do something, you can quickly look up “who to go to for this function.” It’s also something I’ve always wanted to organize for myself, so I’m taking this chance to write it all out. ...

Origin I’ve loved taking notes since medical school and have accumulated thousands of medical notes over the years. But honestly, with information so easy to get and so much to learn now, it’s become hard to keep every note at the same quality using my own structure. On the other hand, in an era of ever-increasing information, trustworthy, high-quality sources have ironically become precious, which makes textbooks a great source of information. However, there are over forty designated reference books for the physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) board examination, and the same concept might be scattered across different chapters in several books. Actually reading through all of them is almost impossible. ...

Recently I was spending time with an older adult, and he said to me: “Life really doesn’t need to be that long. I’m already in my 80s, why would I still go exercise and work out? I already go out and walk several times a day, that’s already very good!” Honestly, the first half—“life doesn’t need to be that long”—stumped me. That’s a question about the meaning of life, not something I can answer in a few sentences in clinic. But the second half—“walking several times is enough”—happens to be my own specialty, and I’m confident about this: walking is great, but for an 80-something older adult, relying just on walking really isn’t quite enough. I’ll start from here in the rest of this post. ...

When I shared my critical appraisal tool a while ago (to have Claude help with critical appraisal and summarizing content), a friend gave me a very honest reply: the tool is nice, but having to dig up the PDF yourself every single time is actually the most annoying part. It really is. To let AI read papers for you, you first need the full text. And when it comes to getting the full text, what usually gets you stuck isn’t the AI—it’s permissions, publishers, and the library. ...

Introduction: Why official scores aren’t enough My workflow for turning recorded lectures into notes goes in a straight line: transcript → matching slides → final summary. The foundation of this line is automatic speech recognition (ASR). However much it mishears, every subsequent layer of notes will be just as wrong. Originally, I was using OpenAI’s Whisper large-v3. The starting point for all this was actually me scrolling on my phone and seeing MediaTek Research announce their Taiwanese model, Breeze-ASR-26. A Taiwanese model is intriguing enough on its own, but clicking through, I learned they had already released Breeze-ASR-25 last year. Fine-tuned from Whisper-large-v2, it was optimized specifically for Taiwanese Mandarin and Mandarin-English code-switching, and open-sourced under Apache 2.0. Medical lectures happen to be ground zero for Mandarin-English code-switching. I had somehow missed this for a whole year. ...

The paper tool paper-review-and-digest I shared earlier had only been open-sourced for a few days when it received its first GitHub issue! I was actually quite happy to get my first issue, and I was even more surprised when I opened it: they didn’t just read my code, but accurately pointed out the parts of the design I was most proud of. He said he appreciated the “hard split between the model and deterministic checks”: grade_judge.py doesn’t trust the level of evidence reported by the model itself, but recalculates it from the downgrade items; argdown_lint.py catches argumentative leaps like “jumping from surrogate endpoints to hard endpoints.” Then he said he built an online portal for me, so visitors don’t need to install Claude Code and can just upload a PDF to run the critical appraisal workflow. He even made a promotional image: ...