Hi, Pablo here
How I write some articles I have a hard time getting started with
I have a lot of shower thoughts. Way more than I can handle. Many times I feel like some of them would make for a nice piece on my webpage, or I should make a personal note out of. But often times they won't catch me in the right place and time to sit down, focus, and type them out. You have to figure out the key points, lay out a plan, think about what you want to say and how, type it all out, work on the text... It burns some calories. And sometimes it's enough friction to kill the idea entirely.
Recently I found a set of AI tools that allow me to capture some of these ideas and lower the friction to get them on ink. My goal is not to have the AI write things for me, but just to quickly drop a pretty decent first draft with very little effort, on the spot. With this, I've happily rescued many good ideas from getting by falling through the cracks before I even hit my desk (or getting ignored because I don't have the energy to go through it all).
Step one: recording myself
I'm self-hosting an open source audio transcription app called scriberr. It's just a fancy little webpage where you can drop audio and get a transcript. The neat bit is that it also allows you to simply record on the spot. I used to host Whishper, but you had to first record then upload a file. I really liked it, but sadly I found that was enough friction when rushing on the phone to not use it. I can access scriberr from my laptop, my desktop, my phone, from anywhere basically.
So anytime I feel like it, I can pull out my phone and start ranting about whatever topic is on my mind. The recording gets sent to my server back home, and scriberr transcribes the whole thing into text automatically. Transcription itself takes a bit because I'm not using a GPU, but I'm not in a rush usually since the important thing is just to get the ideas out of my brain and into text easily.
The transcript that comes out is usually quite decent in terms of accuracy. I'd say around 95% of what I say gets picked up perfectly. The whisper models also do pretty decent in different languages, so I can record in whatever I feel like at each moment.
What's not great, in case you've never used transcription tools, is that the output is just a long stream of words. The model tries its best at punctuation, but it's rather crappy. And obviously, no paragraphs. Plus, with unprepared, spontaneous ranting, structure tends not to be top notch either. Definitely not article-grade text out of the box.
Letting an LLM clean it up
But hey, those are not issues now that we have LLMs! I have a little script that fetches the transcript results from my server to my laptop. Once I have my raw transcript locally, I just pass it on to Claude, with a little prompt saying something like: "This is a transcript of me talking about this and that. Process it for me, I want the output to be like XYZ."
Sometimes I really just ask to have the transcript nicely formatted into paragraphs and proper sentences, with the actual sentences being totally respected. Other times I already ask for some restructuring of the ideas, so it's not just cleaning up the writing but actually shaping it into something that resembles an article. It depends on how clear I was during my rant or what I'm really planning to get out of it.
After this bit, I'll either abandon the idea altogether because it wasn't as interesting as I felt initially, or I'll really work properly in the text when I can and come up with something I'm happy with. It will still take some desk time to get to a final result, but then the article is really my writing and not a mix of my own slop with a layer of LLM slopification on top of it. I can't help but think people who just copy paste LLM output and put their signature under it have little respect for themselves and their reputation, and little love for the act of thinking and writing.
A great starter
And there you go. In just a few minutes, without having to focus deeply in front of a blank file, I end up with a first version of my thoughts that I can already start polishing and thinking from. Not all transcripts make it into clean texts in the end, but at least I ensure some of the ones which would otherwise get lost do survive. The stuff that comes out of the LLM is not always great, to be honest. Sometimes I'll change a lot of things from what I said in the audio. Sometimes I'll end up adding a lot of stuff that I wasn't covering in my original rant. But the first draft helps me get my thoughts out there and gives me something to begin with.
And that's often all I need.