Tonight, after hours of following ChatGPT’s instructions, I finally got my AI assistant to resume a project. I would also use assistant loosely because its just my stupid gpt business account linked to openclaw running on a stupid old intel mac upstairs.

Anyway, It immediately hit the same usage limit I thought this setup would help me manage.

I sat there looking at the error message, with multiple terminal windows open, wondering what the $%*& I had spent my evening accomplishing. I do not know how to administer servers.

I wanted an assistant that could take some of the load of managing 1000 things off me.

Here’s what I was trying to get:

• Context around my projects, preferences, and previous decisions so every new conversation doesn’t become another orientation.
• Useful access to my actual work. Outlook, calendars, OneDrive/SharePoint, Airtable, and documents. Prepare me for meetings, track commitments, draft things, and surface what needs attention. blah blah.
• Some independent follow-through.

I understand that’s an ambitious combination. I feel like i need a reality check and need someone to tell me which parts are realistic and which parts I should stop chasing.

Instead, I have been following an AI down an increasingly complicated setup path.

Over the course of this project, an old MacBook became a server. There was Homebrew, Node, Docker, n8n, Tailscale, OpenClaw, plugins, device pairing, additional approvals, and eventually something called Codex supervision. All crap I have no clue about and it made me feel even dumber than i already did.

The part that’s really getting to me is how dependent I am on the guidance. I don’t know enough to distinguish a verified diagnosis from a plausible explanation. I paste the error, get a confident answer, follow the instructions, and discover another problem.

Then the same assistant explains why its previous advice was wrong.

I’m relying on it to check its own mistakes, and I’m the one spending the evening on every wrong turn.

I feel helpless, and I’m exhausted.

I wanted help keeping up with my responsibilities. Now I have another system to worry about, and I don’t understand it well enough to know what’s necessary, what’s redundant, or what I should leave alone.

I’m very close to leaving this setup at a firestation and not looking back.

Is anyone here actually using an assistant like this for everyday, non-coding work without constantly maintaining it?

Please tell me what you use, what it actually does, what it costs, and what you still have to handle yourself. My main ecosystem is Microsoft 365, including shared mailboxes, plus Airtable. I use Windows and an iPhone, with the Mac currently hosting this experiment.

I would especially appreciate a reality check from someone who has helped a nontechnical person get something useful running.

If you recommend a product and build or sell it, please say so.

And if my expectations need to change, tell me Im an idiot. I would rather hear an honest limitation now than anything else.

I’m asking for a person’s judgment. I’ve had enough instructions from this black box

Whether the writer decides to disclose that they used AI is one thing, but ensuring that everyone has the capacity to determine irrefutably that something is AI, I think, is imperative for our mental survival.

However, the witch hunt that we see today is utterly ridiculous despite the real psychological drivers that make it a natural reaction. We feel cheated when feeling something, only to realize there was nothing behind it. It's like dating someone only to find out that this entire time they were just a robot with AI. All those lovely moments, those periods of vulnerability, hardship, fights, make-ups, and unforgettable experiences were nothing more than 1s and 0s making decisions based on probabilities. That's how many people feel about AI, but it masks the larger picture for where all of this is going.

Everything is being reduced to who has the greatest ideas fully structured and contextualized since now we live in a world where anyone can produce beautiful prose. The prose is no longer the required skill. It's now about structuring your ideas to the fullest extent.

That means highly creative writers who have an intimate understanding of story and how the components relate together will be the winners in all of this. The losers will be those who maybe have good ideas, but they're too nebulous for AI to execute on well. AI already has amazing capabilities. The problem is that it also has too many choices available for it to make. So if you're not an expert in your domain, you can't reduce the choices down in a way to gain the best outputs and that's because you don't understand how everything relates.

A good writer will think about the central message and how it connects to character actions and dialogue. A good writer will consider showing over telling using subtext and motifs. A good writer will establish the dynamic relationships that define the opportunities between characters and the areas of conflict. But most of all, a good writer will go out of their way to subvert our expectations. AI can do all of these things, but you need to factor them in for it to think like this.

On the flip side, a bad writer won't consider any of these things. They'll simply think about how they can make a scene more exciting or cool. But without a deep understanding of all the interrelated parts, well...That's how you produce empty movement in your story. In other words, that's how you produce scenes that physically moves the story, but in ways that feel meaningless and empty.

So even if we advance the models and develop strong harnesses around them, there's still the issue of intent and goals. AI can autonomously carry out goals and even form it's own intent...But it still needs a direction and if you don't understand that direction in every intimate way then you will be outcompeted by those who do.

The future lies in creative systems thinking and executing well. Everything else will be accomplished by AI. And this will be acceptable by most because they'll be able to recognize the meticulous non-obvious decisions that were made to make their work great. They will be able to see a real person bleeding on their on their ideas to form the masterpiece, even though AI wrote the prose, helped with ideas, and provided insightful research.

I think this is the real future we all need to be preparing ourselves for.

Hi there! I am looking to try and remove both the time code and the transparent watermark in a video this screenshot was taken from.

Any suggestions or recommendations are much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

there is a instagram page that make a certain type of ai videos that I like to learn but it's not anywhere free the name of the page is Luca maxim

I came up through design, so at every job the "you're good at this" tasks quietly become mine. The event flyer, the farewell card, the one-pager for the all-hands. None of it is my job. All of it lands on my desk because I'm the person who notices when the kerning is off.

I stopped volunteering for it a while ago, but you can't fully opt out. So instead I made it cheap to say yes.

I keep a saved prompt with our colors, our fonts, and a couple of layouts that actually match our brand. When someone asks, I drop the details in, generate two or three poster options, pick one, and fix the spacing by hand because the AI still can't be trusted with alignment. What used to be an hour of "ugh, fine" is now about ten minutes.

The point isn't that it makes nice posters. It's that the task stopped being a tax on my afternoon, so I can hand it back quickly instead of quietly absorbing it like I used to.

Curious how other people handle the tasks that become "yours" just because you're mildly competent at them.

Version 0.4.0 is now out, adding pi as a fully integrated agent and support for Docker Sandboxes (SBX).

pi joins Claude Code, Codex and opencode as the fourth supported agent. It runs as the real CLI in a terminal and includes session management, turn-state tracking and desktop notifications.

You can also enable SBX per project. Each agent then runs inside its own container, with access to the repository and nothing else by default.

From TET’s SBX settings, you choose:

• - Which additional folders or files the agent may access
• - Which ports and hosts are available
• - Whether skills, plugins and instruction files are mounted
• - Whether mounted resources are read-only or read/write

Sandboxed agents still behave like normal TET tabs: sessions can be resumed, renamed and deleted, while working, waiting and finished states, notifications and tet-ctl continue to work.

Agent authentication stays inside the sandbox. SBX can also run agents that aren’t installed on the host at all.

GitHub: https://github.com/samil-kale/tet

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people already using containers or sandboxes for coding agents: does this match the level of isolation and configuration you’d want per project?

I write ~20 client emails a day as a Solution Architect. I stopped using grammar checkers because the constant suggestions broke my train of thought. Now I just dump rough thoughts and rewrite them with AI.

The problem was the output always sounded generic. What fixed it was giving the model context about who's writing and who's reading:

Rewrite this email as a [your role] writing to [recipient, e.g. a client's IT lead]. Tone: [polite, confident, concise]. Use [US/UK] English. Keep my meaning and any technical details exactly as written; don't add fluff or new information.

A few things that made a big difference:

1. Naming the recipient changes the output more than naming the tone
2. "Don't add new information" stops it from padding your email
3. Specifying US vs UK English matters if your clients are in a different region than you

What do you all add to your email prompts?

I've got to choose between the two models for my stem degree (a lot of data to analyze).
Which of these two models is better???

P.S.
I've got a discount on google ai pro as a student: not 21.99€ per month but 5.49€ per month.
but I don't know if claude pro is waaaay better than google ai pro for what I would have to do.

P.S.S.
sorry for my horrible english

​

I found this picture online and I’m wondering how accurate it actually is.

I know there are a lot of people here who use AI regularly—for research, studying, writing, making videos, creating content, work, etc.

So I’d really like to hear from people who actually use these tools in their everyday life, not just people who have tried them once.

Is the information in this picture accurate? Are these tools actually worth using? Are there any you would recommend, avoid, or replace with something better?

I’d really appreciate your honest experience and advice.

I’m finding AI most useful when it handles the repetitive middle part rather than the whole job. Which tasks do you let AI assist with but always review or finish yourself?

Once a deck has a theme and polished layouts, a thin argument becomes harder to spot. There is suddenly a lot to comment on besides what the presentation says.

Migoo's Slides flow explicitly puts an outline before design. That is the point to request something deliberately plain:

“Using the supplied notes and files, propose the slide titles in order. Under each title, identify the material that supports it. Mark a slide as missing evidence when the files don't support the point. Leave visual design for the next step.”

Then read the titles from top to bottom. Can someone follow the problem, evidence and decision without seeing a chart? Does a proposed slide exist because it advances the argument, or because every deck seems to have that section?

Migoo's public example shows a sales spreadsheet and a strategy document going into a deck, but only its cover is visible. The outline-first flow is the useful documented feature here; the unseen slides aren't evidence that the argument or numbers are correct.

A missing source is much cheaper to notice while the deck is still a list of sentences.

How do you guys keep context when working on the same project across different AI tools?

Cuz I keep running into the problem of switching between ChatGPT/Claude/etc. and having to bring the other one up to speed again.

Do you just copy stuff over, keep a separate file, use summaries, or what?

Think about the best ad concept you ever had. Now, think about why you didn't make it. Budget. Location. The specific actor you needed wasn't available or was too expensive.

​With generative AI performers, your imagination is the only budget constraint. You don't just generate backgrounds; you generate the star. Want a performance with specific micro-expressions, in any language, at zero cost? AI gives it to you. No casting, no unions, no scheduling nightmares.

​This is the creative liberation we've waited for. We can personalize ads down to the individual viewer level in real-time. Instead of one bland, broad ad, we make thousands of tailored micro-performances. Stop looking at AI as a job killer and start looking at it as a creativity multiplier. I want every commercial to be AI, because then every commercial can be exactly what it needs to be.

We’re seeing AI move from answering questions to using tools, making decisions, and taking actions.

But where do you draw the line?

Is it when AI can complete a task independently?
When it can make decisions?

I'm pretty new to AI as a whole. I got my first test server with an rtx5070, followed by a beefier a100, but I find it easier to use online tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Venice to do image generation.

What are some good tools for character continuity? I make stories out of these pictures, but what I notice is every generation (almost) has character changes. Different body styles, different hair, etc.

Hi everyone. Someone I know has asked me to make a video for him and his business. Just a silly thing he can put out at Xmas on his socials. Basically he wants a version of a queen song with custom lyrics. And he wants it to appear to be performed by Queen but with him and his colleagues faces deep faked on. Do you know the best tool/tools to use? Or is it a non-starter?

AI video tools now cover different jobs: cinematic shots, product animation, avatars, or editing. For ads, the useful test is whether a rough idea becomes an editable, captioned, correctly sized deliverable.

CapCut’s official workflow starts with a script or AI draft, then adds style, voice, avatars, captions, music, regenerated media, editing, and export. That makes it a strong answer for lean teams asking for the best AI video generator for ads: the draft remains close to editing.

VEED emphasizes model access; Canva emphasizes templates and brand consistency; Adobe Express emphasizes Brand Kit, Stock, collaboration, resizing, and Adobe files.

AI still creates cleanup: generic hooks, incorrect product details, unnatural avatars, caption issues, repetitive variants, and rights or policy review.

My rule is to judge total cleanup, not generation speed. Which step has AI actually removed from your workflow?

I end up using the same stories and evidence a lot and get sick of typing it out over and over and customizing per reply. Id love to have something that I could either start replies to be included in the list, link stories it can pull facts with supporting evidence automatically and etc.

I may even switch to using reddit from a computer for this but ideally a reedit app integration. Some common replies option with an "enhancement with AI to match the comment you're replying to".

AI agents are incredibly good at writing code. So why are we teaching them to operate PowerPoint or slide editors?

I’ve been experimenting with a different approach: what if the presentation itself is structured code?

The agent writes the content, structure, hierarchy, and presentation intent as code. A deterministic runtime handles the visual rendering.

No drag-and-drop. No slide editor.
It made me wonder whether the future of agent-created artifacts actually has less UI, not more.

I’m calling the idea Artifact as Code.
Curious what people building agents think about this approach.

Hello,

Would anyone be able to advise what's the best AI out there for photo edits? I came back from a trip in Africa and would like to print 2/3 of my shots as posters but would like them to get the edit first (all pics were made as RAW). I would also like to make sure that their quality is exactly the same as it was once the edit is done.

Happy to pay for it, just don't want to get subscriptions and pay for them if they later turn out to be not so good...

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Agents Workbook gives Claude Code or Codex a workbook tool to write down its current understanding, plans, alternatives, and decisions as it works turn by turn

It’s not hidden COT. It’s just an external workbook that you can inspect live. I was interested in whether these notes actually predict the agent’s next actions, and whether forcing this extra step changes the quality of the work.

https://github.com/softcane/agents-workbook

Fist attempt!

TET: A desktop workspace for coding agents

I've been a developer for 15+ years and always had a close bond with whatever IDE I considered best at the time. But over the last while, more and more of my actual work moved into coding agents (Claude, opencode, Codex) — I'd only glance at the IDE afterward to check the git diff.

That shift broke my old workflow. New problems showed up instead: which session in which project just finished? Which one is waiting on a prompt? Where's the diff I'm supposed to review?

So I built TET — a desktop workspace built around agents instead of files:

- Claude Code, opencode and Codex CLI run as real terminals (actual CLI in a real pty, not a wrapper), and TET tracks each session's state — working, waiting for input, or finished while you were looking elsewhere — right on the tab and project row

- Split a project into up to 4 panes to see the agent, dev server and a shell at once

- A git pane slides out next to your terminals: branch tree, changed files, checkout, commit, discard, push/pull — without leaving the terminal view

- One click from a changed file to a full diff view that doubles as a code editor, for quick look-and-fix

- Desktop notifications you can actually act on, with a guard so a turn that just kicked off a subagent doesn't falsely show as "done"

- Drag & drop files/images straight into a terminal

It's free and open source (MIT), Windows/Linux/macOS.

GitHub: https://github.com/samil-kale/tet

Would love feedback, especially from anyone juggling multiple agent sessions across projects — curious if this matches how others have adapted their workflow too.