Automation

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. ...

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: ...

A while back, I shared the paper reading site I built for myself, and I got quite a few messages asking, “Can I use this too?” and “How exactly does it work?” I’ll explain it clearly in this post, and while I’m at it, I’ll let you know that I’ve organized it into an open-source version and put it on GitHub. First, the problem I wanted to solve. As a physiatrist, there are dozens of journals I want to track, along with a few authors I really want to follow and a couple of topics I’m always keeping an eye on. The traditional approach is to dump a bunch of RSS subscriptions into a reader or a notes app. As a result, hundreds of papers pile up every day, and it quickly turns into a garbage dump of “I’ll never finish reading this, and I don’t even know where to start.” In the end, you either get anxious or just give up reading altogether. ...

📖 Saving Tokens series (four parts): Part 1: Why your AI gets dumber the more you chat · Part 2: Don’t boot up a supercomputer if an abacus will do · Part 3: Setting up a clean desk for your AI · Part 4 (this post, the finale) We’ve arrived at the final post of the series. Over the first three parts, we went from “why your AI gets dumber the more you chat” all the way to “when not to use AI” and “how to clean up its desk.” This post is about the moment you actually spend the money: how to make every penny count. ...

📖 Token Saving Series (4 parts): Part 1: Why your AI gets dumber the longer you chat · Part 2 (This post) · Part 3: Clearing a clean desk for your AI · Part 4: I built a budget dashboard for my AI In the previous post, we talked about how longer AI chats get more expensive and dumber, along with three ways to save right now. This post takes it a step further to discuss a more fundamental divide: ...

📖 The Token Saving Series (4 parts): Part 1: Why your AI gets dumber the more you chat · Part 2: If an abacus works, don’t boot up a supercomputer · Part 3 (This post) · Part 4: I built a budget dashboard for my AI The first two posts were still at the “everyone can use this” level. Starting with this one, I’ll show you the setup on my computer that I’ve endlessly tinkered with. ...

Ever since becoming a resident, looking for continuing education courses has hit the same pain point every time: ultrasound, manual therapy, foot and ankle, neuro, pediatric rehab… The courses are scattered across a dozen society and institution websites. I’d have to refresh the sites every few days, and I was never sure if I’d actually seen a particular post before. Later on, I set up web scrapers for these course pages in my Home Assistant at home to automatically notify me of new courses, and things finally got a lot easier. But realizing I’d be completing residency soon, this little tool sitting at home wouldn’t be able to keep reminding the junior residents. Figuring I had Claude anyway, I just asked it to scrape all the courses and announcements from these 17 rehab-related societies and institutions, aggregate them in one place, update automatically every 3 hours, and put it on the web for everyone to use. ...