Posts

Last week I gave an intro class on AI agents for some anesthesiologist friends. The post-class feedback was interesting: “permission prompts and auto mode” showed up near the top of two different lists. A lot of people voted it “most useful,” but a lot also voted it “didn’t understand.” That means it’s important, but the pacing of a single class just wasn’t enough to cover it. I’ll explain it all here in this post. ...

A few days ago, a junior colleague who just started coding with AI asked me a great question: she lets AI directly drive her browser to do things, but her passwords are all saved in the browser. Is this actually safe? I think this question is worth breaking down into two layers, because people often mix them up when worrying about them. After looking into it seriously, I turned the answer into an open-source tool, which I’ll introduce at the end of the post. ...

A while back on Facebook, I shared the results of using AI to organize lecture videos. I got an unexpectedly huge response, and people kept asking when I’d release the tool. I’ve spent some time cleaning it up, and today it’s officially open source: lecture-to-notes. Key takeaways from this post Why everyone records lectures, but nobody goes back to finish watching them Notes don’t have to be shaped like “text + pictures”: video, transcript, and summary synced on one page Bring whatever you have: video, audio, slides, photos, all connected to the same timeline A few technical insistences: the transcript never automatically changes words, timing uses evidence instead of guessing Why OCR alone isn’t enough: how to tell if textless flowcharts and ultrasounds are important Fallback options for running without an NVIDIA GPU The forest of tripods at the back of the classroom I’ve always found physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) lectures hard to take notes on. For classes like manual therapy and musculoskeletal ultrasound, the knowledge is hidden in the “movements.” You can’t capture it no matter how much text you write down. So the venue is always packed with tripods. Everyone’s recording, planning to review it later over a meal. ...

This is the third post in the getting-started-with-AI series. Part 1 covered how to set it up, and Part 2 covered how to talk to it and set up guardrails. At the end of Part 2, I said: the hard part is never “how to ask,” it’s “how to design the workflow.” This post will wrap up that statement. The answer might be the opposite of what you think: workflows aren’t designed, they grow. ...

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. ...