My wife and me quite extensively used a group conversation in ChatGPT to help us face some health-related issues. It was beneficial to a visit to the hospital and still is after the visit yesterday. It is so much more helpful than having to google things and try to figure out what is going on.

Keeping track of all those services API keys, authorization tokens, API and MCP endpoints, their respective level of authorization is starting to feel cumbersome. 🥴

Consuming AI Can Be Expensive

While experimenting with n8n and LLM services, I realize that using artificial intelligence can become a very costly hobby. The fact that the consumption of these services relies on two separate offerings — the subscription to the interactive service and on-demand billing for APIs — requires careful management and wise choices of providers.

Currently, I use ChatGPT and Claude AI in interactive mode, but I also need a provider to access AI via APIs. This latter mode of consumption is particularly expensive if you’re not careful.

Woke up this morning and appreciated the results of my first n8n automation: a Craft Daily note with a list of topics for the day automagically created for the current day. I did use Craft Templates before, but I prefer the programmatic route because it enables much more powerful content creation by consuming different sources via APIs. For now, my automation doesn’t, but I’ll iterate on that.

My Learning Approach

Still exploring n8n, slowly but systematically. Because I’ll be using all sorts of external services like Craft, Micro.blog, Ghost, Inoreader, my strategy is to do individual integration tests instead of trying to build a biggy workflow and find all sorts of errors. Each of these micro experiments is forming the building blocks of something bigger. This approach is not different from the one I used for building iPhone apps and learning Objective-C and Interface Builder back in the day. I guess I’m a bottom-up kind of guy when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff.

Started learning more about Vercel. I see a lot of people using it for many different things. Seems quite capable even on the free tier. I might need it for some projects involving Craft. 🤓 Anyone using Vercel here? Thoughts?

I knew I could build my Discord server, but didn’t really pay attention to it and couldn’t figure out what purpose it served. Now I do. So I created one so that, among my many use cases for this, it can receive a webhook call when one of my websites is down, thanks to Tinylytics’ webhook support.