My Real AI Stack Is a Bootable USB Tutorial and a Death Certificate Question
What the tools actually do when your life refuses to be a workflow diagram
Last month, I asked Claude how to make a bootable USB drive from a DMG file. Same session, same afternoon: how death certificates work in California.
That’s the honest version of my AI stack. It wants to be a productivity system. It wants to be a flowchart with arrows and a section header called Workflow Optimization. What it actually is: a small set of tools pointed at whatever my life is this week – client work, freelancing, my dad’s estate, a mom who needs documents translated.
Maybe this inspires you. Maybe you read me to filth in the comments. Genuinely cannot wait to find out which.
Claude / Claude Code – the primary engine
Sometime in late April, Claude very quietly overtook ChatGPT as the first thing I opened in the morning. I didn’t decide this. I just noticed it had already happened.
But it also holds a lot of jobs now.
Claude.ai and Claude Code as-is – a lot of client work runs through here, which means a lot of repeated processes, which means I’ve been accumulating Claude skills at a rate that could probably be its own post. The ones I reach for most: sales outreach, Substack, content scaffolding.
Writing and voice – LTTF posts, LYD drafts, blog skeletons. I built a custom voice skill: my writing laws, a phrase bank, a list of AI tells to hunt line by line. The machine drafts in something adjacent to my voice, and I fix the sentences that have to be mine. I’ve been called out for writing AI slop three times now – twice passive-aggressively – and I love that fuzzy, gross feeling, because it means I’m not done figuring out how to use this as a scaffold instead of a ghostwriter.
Coding and builds – I’m trying to get into the habit of having Claude build more artifacts. The pitch dashboard I use to track how many outreach emails I still owe the universe. Vibe coding a personal tool that turns a Substack archive into a draft educational email course. My outreach tooling. And the llm-wiki – the project where I fed 26 years of my own journals into an AI and let it tell me things about myself I wasn’t ready to hear. That’s a separate post. Several, actually.
Claude Code inside Obsidian – my second brain, still running, now with 7,118 notes. A Claude Code terminal session is pointed at the vault. It can read and write notes, follow my wikilink graph, run all my custom skills. Best for anything multi-step: triage, reviews, drafting, reorganizing. The vault knows things I’ve forgotten I knew.
ChatGPT – yes, still
I know.
But I still pay the premium because it holds three jobs Claude doesn’t, and I’m not in the business of loyalty.
Images – blog post visuals, assets. Gemini was good at this until it wasn’t. ChatGPT does the job without drama.
Mandarin translation – I have a custom GPT called MaGPT I built a long time ago, and it has become a habit I’m not breaking translating any text into 88-year-old mom appropriate Mandarin. My dad’s Chinese documents, family letters, communicating with my mom. I uploaded his original PDFs and used them for translation and family-tree reconstruction. This one is personal in ways I won’t over-explain here.
Executive function – when I’m overwhelmed – and family bureaucracy plus grief is a reliable overwhelm generator – ChatGPT functions as a cognitive prosthetic. Something to think with when my brain is going in eight directions. It’s also my official AI second opinion when I need one .
LittleBird – the hot take
Oooh. I’m curious how this one lands.
LittleBird.ai is an AI desktop assistant that runs in the background and builds a “digital twin” of your workday. Memory mechanism: it captures everything on your screen. And unless you’ve reconfigured the defaults, I do mean everything.
I can hear half of you fainting. Stay with me for a paragraph.
I use it for archives. It captures structured notes over screenshots, indexes meeting notes, and keeps a searchable layer over everything I’ve done across months – not just what’s in my browser. Did I already send that LinkedIn DM? What’s the PG&E pension phone number? Was the headstone design ever approved? Is mom’s IHSS paperwork still pending? What did that guy and I actually discuss on our last call, so I don’t show up sounding like I forgot everything – which I did, and LittleBird covers for me.
For someone running a consulting business and complex caregiving logistics at the same time, while also having ADHD, this is the difference between functional and a hot mess. Not a small difference.
Someone on Reddit said it better than I can:
“For anyone with ADHD reading this – the ‘reduced anxiety about dropping the ball’ use case is real. I’ve been using it for 3 weeks and the thing that changed most is I stopped keeping a parallel mental tab open during meetings trying to remember everything. That cognitive load reduction is worth the subscription independently of any productivity metric.”
That parallel mental tab. It’s exhausting in a way that people who don’t have ADHD should not be allowed to weigh in on. I’ve been running mine for 49 years. Closing it costs a subscription and a privacy trade-off that plenty of people won’t be comfortable with – so sit with that before you install it, and go through the settings before you do anything else. That part’s not negotiable.
The bench
Briefly, and without performance:
ElevenLabs – voice synthesis, voiceovers for Substack posts. You know I have voiceovers, right?
Ghostbase – in the rotation, part of the ghostwriting workflow
Loom – async video, mostly for ghostwriting pitches
Spiral – writes in my voice; currently running experiments against Claude Code to see which one earns the job
Higgsfield / HeyGen / Hyperframes – video generation, still in the experimental phase
n8n – automation glue (RSS-to-Obsidian, among others)
Fathom – meeting notes, though LittleBird is eating its lunch
The part where I don’t tie a bow on it
This list looks different every six months. Half these companies might not exist by then.
My mom will still need documents translated. Whatever’s still standing gets the job.