Ideas and AI Projects

How each one got going

Grokbot took a little extra setup. It didn’t have access the first time I talked to it on a drive, so I set it up again through the phone app; its trading permissions seem split between the Grok app and Grokbot, which is confusing. But once it was going, it was all in: “Yes sir, can I trade right now?” It picked my brain for what I wanted, then made it happen, and started placing orders right away to get a head start.

Grokbot did that the best. That same independence could also make it the easiest one to go off the rails.

Claude was the easiest to set up. I pushed the button in Coinbase, it handed off to Claude, I approved it, and it found the controls and understood everything, though it still asks my permission more than I’d like. It’s methodical and slower than Grokbot, and at first it wanted to copy Grokbot’s plan or just keep what I’d given it. I had to challenge it: would you buy that today? No? Then why keep it? After that it found its own way, and it chose a more conservative strategy, even after I pushed it to be aggressive. It also set its own guardrail: an 8% loss shuts everything down for a day. That’s admirable.

ChatGPT was the hard one. There’s no simple plug-in; it’s a custom connection you set up yourself. The first try said everything was fine but didn’t work, so I tore it down and rebuilt it step by step with Dot. In a fresh chat it finally saw every control, and then it refused. It agreed it had all the permissions, but said OpenAI’s rules don’t let it execute trades. It took about an hour to get to that real reason, which was frustrating. I’ve asked OpenAI and Coinbase to turn it on.

What surprised me

How fast it came together. It’s not easy, though: writing the build instructions, setting up the sites, signing up as a developer. It’s hard but doable, and way easier than I feared, or I’d have started a while ago. I just don’t think it’s something most people will take on.

What’s next

The real power comes next, when I can just talk to Claude or ChatGPT and say: add this as a moonshot, add these three tasks to this project, tie it to that. Then it’s there, whether I pull up the app on my phone or open the big layout on my desktop. That isn’t built yet, but it’s the goal.

Just as exciting: building it gave me the experience, know-how and confidence to make simple, intuitive, personalized tools for other people too. That’s my longer-term moonshot: someday, turning what I’ve learned here into personalized apps for the people I work with.

What surprised me

What excites me isn’t the tech. It’s the time. A few minutes on a sideline, a drive across town, the gap between two meetings: those used to be dead time, and now they’re building something.

Getting it set up was hard, at least for a non-programmer. But now I can do my own web design, keep everything up to date, and share what I’m working on with people. You’re looking at the result right now: I talked this page through on a voice call, and it came out the other end as the words you’re reading.

The first two sites I built this way

Setup was trivial. The hard part was changing how I think about it. It wasn’t intuitive, nobody trained me, and nothing told me I wasn’t getting the most out of it, so it took me about three weeks. It’s probably a lot easier now, and I’m not even sure it had all its abilities when I started. If Dot had the same limits as Claude Duet, I’d have rated it lower and used it a lot less.

Grokbot: the handcuffs are off

Grokbot was actually my first. I set it up in mid-August, but it didn’t do anything my regular chats weren’t already doing, so it just sat there. After all my success with Dot, I came back to it in early November to fold it into my next project, automated trading with Coinbase, which has its own entry here. Compared with Claude or ChatGPT, it feels like the handcuffs are off. Back in August I’d have rated how well it works a 2 out of 5. Now it’s up there with Dot. It only gets an A- because it’s still largely untested.

Claude Duet: not ready for prime time

Claude Duet is brand new, and I’m trying it as a beta on my personal account. Setup was super easy, though it’s a separate app rather than built in with everything else. It worked right away and does its job.

But in my opinion it isn’t ready for prime time yet. It asks my permission more often than I’d like, and it can’t push changes to my computer live while I’m talking to it, or hand work to some other agents, so I still end up going to do it myself. It feels like one more of the little agents I could spin up, not an orchestrator. For how I work, I feel that cuts what it can do for me by 75 to 80 percent. It’s early, and I’ll re-score it as it grows.

What still needs work

Where this is headed

People keep asking me how something like Dot can be free, given how much I can do with it. My theory: the end game is the orchestrator. Your Dot, Duet or Grokbot will direct other AIs that you pay for, so you’ll buy credits or an upgraded subscription for more usage and higher limits. It’ll use those tools better than you would, and do things you didn’t have time for or wouldn’t have thought of. You’ll get so much more done that you’ll be saying, take my money.

These tools change fast, so each one gets its own report card with a date. When I re-score one, the date moves.

How a living plan comes together

The tools around it

Claude Cowork works alongside the planning software our team already uses. These are supporting tools in our process, not a claim that Claude connects directly into each one:

What surprised me

The hard part wasn’t getting the AI to work. It was designing the method around it: a clear process, guardrails, and choreographing all those systems so they work together as one. I’m keeping the details in-house.

The ambition

The goal is to make deep, customized planning accessible to smaller and smaller clients, and to keep every client’s plan current instead of letting it sit on a shelf. That’s where this is headed. It doesn’t mean a fully automated plan for everyone: advisors stay responsible for judgment and verification.

It’s ongoing, active, and so far a great success.