🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
Things built: 13 People watching: 6 Cashflow:-$25
🤖 🧠 Learning
Teaching myself to teach AI to teach me how to build an SEO optimized directory with AI. Day twelve.
There’s this irritating thing that happens when you are using the generic chats in AI. You start working on something, produce artifacts, maybe a type of document you’re tailoring or a project, such as this learning journey I’m on with building directories, and then the chat you’re on reaches its size limit.
You now have to start a new chat, where many if not all of the things AI has learned about what you want from it, what it was doing right and wrong, are lost. You basically have to retrain the damn thing, and that’s assuming you remember the things that made sense in context a couple of days ago.
The models have gotten better at reading previous chats when you tell it to but this is far from perfect. They hallucinate things, and it can take a while for you to notice.
This happened to me twice today. Continuing work on Claude’s project five on my directory education, it ran out of space. When I continued in a new chat, instructing it to reference our previous conversations, it completely changed its approach. Instead of walking me through each bit of work with specific instructions on what to do on each tool, it just barfed a huge document at me. Even when I told it to go back to the old method, it wasn’t as good as the previous one, from yesterday, where it excelled helping to trouble shoot the deployment issues.
I also use Claude to help me with job search. Specifically I use it to tailor my CVs and cover letters to job descriptions. It took a while to get it to work the way I want it to. At first it would create experience out of thin air just to meet the requirements for the role instead of showing how my actual experience addressed these requirements, for instance. Now I know how to prompt it better so I get the results I want: a more subtle approach mirroring the hiring managers language without going over the top.
But every 6-8 CVs it runs out of space in the chat and I have to start the process all over again.
It’s a pain in the ass, and the results are inconsistent which leads to me having to do more editing and reviewing work.
I did the only logical thing. I asked Claude how I could solve this. The answer: projects.
Projects are a set of instructions and examples that the AI can reference each time it works. Naturally I asked it to make a first draft of instructions based on old chats which I then edited to remove hallucinations and instructions I didn’t want it to follow as well as a copy of my vanilla CV.
Filled with confidence that I had finally solved my problem, I started a chat in the project, fed it a job description and told it to get to work. The result was probably the worst, most hallucination heavy, piece of garbage it had yet created.
After I told Claude that it had been very, very bad, and it apologized profusely, I remembered something I’ve been meaning to write about here: that many of the techniques that lead to fruitful interactions with humans also work with AI. In this case, I asked it what had caused the hallucination and what I could change in the instructions that would avoid this going forward.
It pointed me to where in the instructions there was an example that was supposed to show proper format but was populated with wrong dates, roles and experience for me, and also gave me a specific set of directions to add to the instructions to avoid this in the future.
Well, that fixed it.
Working effectively with AI takes practice, and a willingness to continually ask it how it got its results, both bad a good, so that you can point it in the right direction more consistently.
🍯 🦡 Building
What did I ship today?
A Claude project for tailoring my CV to specific roles. I like to think of it as a skill even though that is the wrong nomenclature. Something I will continue tinkering with as I continue to use it. It will save me time and heartache every time a chat gets too long.
🤑 Selling
Here you’ll find either things I’ve made with AI or affiliate links to tools I’m using.
Whispr Flow - smart speech to text - you and I both get a free month when you sign up.
Beehiiv - used to make this - you get a free month and 20% off for three months, I get a nice little kickback
Netlify - free web hosting for your projects - No kickback for me on this one
Emergent - vibe coding platform - you get extra credits and so do I when you sign up
Last Word.
Ask simple questions. They often provide the best answers.
Till next time,