Using AI
I use AI for a bunch of stuff. Whether it's building a tool for myself, exploring an idea or automating some clunky workflows. I get my inspiration from other people. I remix and play around to feel how things work, throw away the majority and follow my curiosity.
Devices
I wanted to explore the history of popular tech devices over time.
i want to make a site for forgotten devices over the years, they should look realistic. A timeline scrubber to cycle through them.
It started as a grid of fifty images generated by Astra, mostly to test it's capabilities. Then a couple of weeks later I came across a site where you drag through the years and a button changes as you scrub. So I merged the two things together.
I used subagents to find a device for each one and generate the images.
A book that isn’t on Kindle
I wanted to finish The Motern Method, but it isn’t on Kindle and I only read on the app. So I filmed myself flicking through the last chapter on my phone and sent the video to my agent.
analyse the video frames and extract the text and put into one html file and publish with here.now - video is in ~/Downloads/IMG_7131.MOV
It cut the video into frames, read every page and put it on here.now. About 36 cents. It wasn’t quite word for word, which is its own story in The Motern Method.
Games for the twins
In the summer I built a mini game arcade site for my three-year-old twins to keep them entertained on our flight.
i want to have one game site with a bunch of games linked and made for my 3year old twins.
It’s grown a lot since, from watching them play. Tweaking interactions as I saw them tapping like accidentally zooming the page and pressing the wrong buttons.
The mascot
I made a little mascot called Bites in tldraw. I had it animated so it could jump, wave, blink and be interactive on my personal website.
Then I wanted to build a tool to play around with it.
i want a mini tool that i can test moving and changing the interactivity of my mascot
Words for talking to agents
As I'm not a designer or developer, I don't know the proper words to use for what I want when I'm talking to agents. So I spun something up to help me get away from AI-slop designs.
It started as a style picker.
I'm just trying to think about a really good way to have text and the visual in one place so that a user could see the text and the visual together so they would know what to ask for when talking to agents.
Then it turned into a visual dictionary. Every word comes with a small example of what it looks like. You pick the ones you like and copy the prompt for your agent.
Once that worked I wanted the same for the technical terms agents use. index.how does it well for design words, and Matt Pocock made one for AI coding, so I used those to get started.
build a site like this https://index.how/to/articulate - but for the non-technical crowd starting to use agents. a good start here https://github.com/mattpocock/dictionary-of-ai-coding
i want an image drawn for each that helps explain the word/meaning.
Playing with data
I saw Riley Walz's realtime site about who rides SF Muni. I liked the realtime-data so thought of a way to use that with something else, AI model usage: who’s using what, at any point in the day.
look at the site https://walzr.com/sf-muni/then look at openrouter api docs - im thinking about a simple site like sf-muni that shows who's using what models at any point in the day. what data can we get from openrouter to achieve this?
OpenRouter shows the numbers on a public page for each app. So my agent scrapes the data and an automation updates it every five minutes.
I also wanted to see how many tokens I use across all the different agent harnesses and models I use.
i want to build an 'github activity graph' but for all my token usage across all the agent apps i use: claude, factory, codex, bb, pi
the graph is only to be shown on bentossell.com
what do you suggest?
I love The Pudding, they make beautiful interactive data stories. In July I asked an agent to clone one of their stories, just to see if it could. Then I remixed it with a different dataset.
i want to change the subjects and the data for the love story, lets adapt / remix it first, i dont want to just do a clone. what could we do? what data could we use?
What I keep for myself
As much as I use agents for a wide range of things, I prefer to handle some myself.
Where these came from
Nearly all of these started with someone else’s work: Riley’s Muni site, a Pudding story, the timeline site, index.how, Matt’s list, GitHub’s activity grid. The rest started with my kids, or a book I couldn’t get on Kindle.
So if you see something you like, ask your agent to build you one, about something you care about.
Notes
- Devices, a book off my phone, games for the twins, a mascot, two dictionaries of words, and a lot of data sites.
- Nearly all of them started with someone else’s work. I remix it and see how it feels.
- I throw away the majority and follow my curiosity.
- Some things I still do myself.
- If you see something you like, ask your agent to build you one, about something you care about.