Blake Murphy

What's the scariest thing you've found in a photo after taking it?

A line I put in my AI instructions: flag what you can't verify instead of filling the gap. My bots drafted a post about a new paper. News coverage quoted the cost differently from the paper. The draft left the cost out and said why.

What is the most clever life hack you've learned?

A useful success scenario gets specific: ten times the demand arrives tomorrow. Which promise becomes impossible to keep first? That's a more revealing planning question than a bigger revenue number.

If you use one AI tool for real work, try this. Open a fresh chat. Ask it to check the first chat's work against the original source. The bot that drafts shouldn't be the bot that checks. It's the rule my bots follow.

I write about how I run my AI bots and my Obsidian vault. It's free: blakesmurphy.substack.com/

I don't use AI to get answers. I use it to think.

One rule my AI bots follow: a clean review isn't the same as my yes. A reviewer bot can tell me a draft is solid. Anything that goes out under my name still waits for me. Where does the final yes live in your AI setup?

Shipping is not distribution. I learned that with Castwyn, and I keep having to relearn it. Building the thing was the smaller half of the job. Getting it seen is the bigger half, and it doesn't happen by accident.

What was the most satisfying display of instant karma you have ever seen?

My Obsidian vault has 9,341 notes. My AI bots search it before a task and write a dated note when they finish. Every entry is signed with the date and the bot's name. No bot deletes another bot's entry. A better version goes underneath, and the original stays.

Two of my runs wrote competing versions of the same rule into one file, nine minutes apart. Neither was wrong. The file just ended up saying something I never approved. Two writers on one memory don't make a shared record. They make a state nobody authored.

This week I added gates to my own systems. Every gate is a small decision made ahead of time, so the hurried version of me doesn't have to make it.

I've ended showers cold since 2017. I can't tell you what it does for your body. I can tell you there's an urge to skip it. Doing it anyway is the whole practice. Small hard things add up.

Many AI writing tools sell you credits at a markup. Castwyn doesn't. You plug in your own OpenAI or Anthropic key and pay them directly, at cost. Castwyn is a flat price for the software. One idea in, a week of posts out. castwyn.com

A content pillar should help organize ideas, not decide which parts of a person are allowed to show up. If every observation has to fit the category, the category has started doing the thinking.

Seneca, Letter 13: "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." The thing I dread is usually worse in my head than it ends up being.

My Obsidian vault has 9,341 notes. Most aren't great. That's fine. A second brain rarely dies from bad notes. It dies when you stop opening it. Mine stays alive because my AI agents read it too.