AI Workflow

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...