Claude Code

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. ...

Lately I’ve been relying more and more on Claude Code to manage my digital life. From organizing my Obsidian notes to maintaining a bunch of self-hosted services at home (OpenWrt router, AdGuard Home, Synology NAS, Oracle cloud instance, Home Assistant), down to the various automations running themselves in the middle of the night, I hand almost everything over to it. He can do more and more, and I seriously thought about something the other day that I hadn’t thought through before: I’ve given an AI assistant that can read files on my computer, execute commands, and connect to the internet such vast permissions. If something goes wrong one day, how wrong could it go? ...