[SyneRyder]

Well, I've offered what I can to help. If your experience is mostly free chatbots, I would definitely suggest trying Opus 4.5 or 4.6 in Claude Code. The agentic harness of the software around the model (ie Claude Code) is important. Consider also that some of us have been doing this for a year and have already built our own MCP server tooling to go faster. Giving your AI the same kind of deterministic software tools that you use is important (eg make sure your AI has access to a diff tool, don't make it try and do that "in its head", you wouldn't ask that of a human).

As for listening to Hacker News... yeah, this is one of the worst places (well, Mastodon is worse) and HN is surprisingly AI-doomerish. I don't check in here very often anymore, and as of this week I just get Claude to summarize HN headlines as a morning podcast for me instead.

My own experience: my first few uses of Claude in Dec 2024 seemed rubbish, I didn't get it. Then one day I asked it to make me a search engine. The one shot from that wasn't perfect, but it worked, and I saw it build it in front of my eyes. That was the moment & I kept iterating on it. I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

Anyway, hope it helps, but if not using AI makes you feel more comfortable, go with what fills your life with more value & meaning & enjoyment.

[nottorp]

> I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.

So you have the resources to index the whole www on your own?

[SyneRyder]

No, but I index parts of the web that are important to myself, sites I frequently reference. (I have all of Simon Willison's site indexed, for example.) It turns out that a simple SQLite database is a lot more capable and faster than I thought. I index from my laptop, using another tool I built with Claude. I don't crawl or spider, I focus on indexing from sitemap.xml files and RSS feeds. I have about 1.5 Million pages in my local index, and I get search results in 40ms - 70ms, thereabouts.

For every search that doesn't find results - and of course that's still the majority - it falls back to a meta-search combining results from Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia. The core of that metasearch is what Claude 3.5v2 generated for me in a one-shot back in Dec 2024. Kagi is just a metasearch with a very small local index as well, and my main purpose in building this was replacing Kagi for my needs.

The last 10% of my queries were widget queries like currency conversion, distance & temperature conversion etc that I was using for about 10% of my search queries.