For people who are done letting outside voices — technology, experts, cultural noise — drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
I took the plunge and got a Claude Max subscription. And I'm a sorcerer now.
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Heyo, I thought I might share some rougher thoughts and experiences with you. The more I work with LLMs, the more I see the signatures of LLM-speak in the posts and content I read. I use it, obviously, and I'm finding it so refreshing to human-written stuff. Both are true! And I do believe we can create beautifully human things with AI assistance. I use different AI tools for different purposes. I use both ChatGPT and Claude. And I always have. I've found that they're great at different things. Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have been getting a lot of press lately after that White House piece of news. I've always admired their stance on transparency and ethics. And at the end of the day, they're a for-profit company and are a business. Interpret that how you will. I love Claude's Desktop app for all the different things I'm able to do with it to unlock my creativity. I'd been using it on some book-length level projects and it consumed my usage rates like crazy. I started organizing my day around my usage windows — anyone else doing that? 🙋🏽♀️ — and finally decided to get the Max subscription. Let me test it out for a month. Well. Let me tell you. It's unlocked a whole new level of creativity. Last year, I'd decided to try out a couple "vibe coding" tools like v0 and Figma Make. I use Figma Make a lot at work to build tools for myself. I wrote about my experience and ultimately gave up (at that point) trying to build anything sophisticated. My LinkedIn is flood with AI this, AI this. Claude Code this, Claud Code that. Now, with the Max subscripton, I decided to try Claude Code. I am blown away! I feel like a magical wizard! I fixed the wellness app I'd starting building with v0 and it works! I learned how to connect to tools I use and work more efficiently. I'm building my very own human design app and have ideas I'm sooooo excited about building for other apps. I'll keep sharing what I learn as I go. If there's anything in particular you'd like me to write or share about, let me know. If you want to try any of my apps out, reply to this email and I'll bring you in as a beta tester :) I still firmly believe in my Three Zone Framework. I've found myself getting in the red sometimes. With how excited I am, I've been spending 8+ hours on my computer working until dark. It's energizing and I feel so excited. And my neck hurts. My laundry needs to be done. I am reminded, yet again, of the importance of balance and taking my time. Diving back into my developing hole now, Rachel |
Renaissance Rachel
For people who are done letting outside voices — technology, experts, cultural noise — drown out their own. Every issue explores how to reclaim your discernment, your body awareness, and your creative authority across the parts of life that matter most: technology, relationships, wellness, work, and creativity.
A few weeks ago, my mother-in-law handed me a stack of pillows she wasn't using anymore. I took them home without thinking much of it. The following Sunday, she saw them sitting out at my place and told me, in Serbian, where they'd come from. One of them, her own mother had embroidered. I understood every word. I'm still learning the language, and that day, it landed. That pillow moment turned into something bigger: the same question I've been sitting with for years, long before "human...
Some of my most productive moments happen when I'm so focused that time disappears. I love when that happens. What I'm noticing lately is that working with Claude creates its own rhythm. I'll set it on a task that takes a few minutes to process. While it works, I could open two more tasks and start bouncing between them. Sometimes that works. Sometimes I end up scattered, getting less done than if I'd just waited. What's been working better: I step away from the computer entirely. Yesterday I...
Last evening, my husband and I went for a walk. Along the way, an elderly neighbor asked for help picking cherries from his tree. Long story short, we ended up with over a gallon of cherries and I had the opportunity to figure out what to do with them. It gave me a taste of what seasonal living is really like. I grew up having everything available year round at supermarkets. I often wonder about what life was like before modern conveniences. What did people do? Well, when your neighbor's...