A friend, James Welland, asked where he’d find time to do what I’m doing with this blog. His idea: describe your daily routine to an LLM and ask it to find cracks.

Another way of looking at it: the cracks were always there. The change is that I don’t write anything. I have a copywriter on my phone.

Fresh vs stale

I’ve noticed two modes that work equally well for generating posts:

  1. Hop on an idea as soon as I feel it coming. Start dictating immediately.
  2. Start recording with no idea at all. Watch myself talk until something pulls me along.

Both feel effortless. What doesn’t work is saving ideas to a backlog and coming back later. Those feel like work in a way the others don’t.

The difference is freshness. An idea captured in the moment has momentum. An idea revisited is inert. You have to regenerate the context, rediscover why it mattered.

The infrastructure

This only works because of three things:

Speech to text on the move. I dictate into my phone while doing other things. Childcare, walking, making snacks. The cracks in the day become usable.

Tailscale. My phone can task my laptop from anywhere. I speak, the laptop acts. I don’t need to be at a desk.

Frontier models. The dictation gets distilled into a post. Twenty minutes of verbal rambling becomes a thousand words of prose. The model handles the cleanup, the structure, the transitions. I stay in the loop, but the friction is gone.

Nothing in the posts is content I haven’t dictated. They’re tight distillations of much longer ramblings. I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t stick to the spirit of what I said.

I’m always surprised at how direct the results are. Most posts are essentially a patchwork of fragments I actually said, rearranged into something cohesive and less flabby. I struggle to find text I don’t recall saying myself.

Remove any one of these and the whole thing breaks down. Speech without remote access means waiting until I’m home. Remote access without models means doing the cleanup myself. Models without speech means typing, which means a desk, which means no cracks.

Volume compounds

Here’s the unexpected part: generating a large volume of ideas causes me to have more ideas. The act of flushing things out makes space for new things to arrive.

I was originally planning to cluster posts and spread out the dates. But I’m wondering now if I should just keep going. See what happens when you don’t throttle the output.

This conversation itself could be a post. So here it is.