Goals

1. Improve my writing and editing workflow, with emphasis on editing. While I'm comfortable with capturing thoughts as initial drafts, refining content into polished final drafts is my biggest area for improvement.
2. Gain practical experience, develop perspective on the capabilities and limitations of AI tools as discussed later.

Motivation

My experience with both Notion AI and Claude for editorial support on my personal writing has been positive. While Notion AI offers seamless integration with Notion, its tool-specific nature makes the $8/month pricing seem less compelling compared to more versatile tools like Claude being cost-free with usage limits or $20/month for less restrictions. Claude also offers broader utility beyond Notion. The Hardfork podcast discusses some…interesting emerging use cases. But it lacks native Notion integration, so copy-pasting between tools is required.

Shift in my perspective on AI

I became less skeptical of the AI tool wave after listening to the podcast episode, AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype – with Simon Willison (co-creator of Django) [available on Spotify or directly on The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter]. As the co-creator of Django - a framework popular for enabling rapid development - and a heavy AI user, Willson is highly informed yet approachable. Even though I read a decent amount about how others are using AI, this actually inspired me to experiment more actively, such as this very exercise.

Key takeaways

• Actively engage: Everyone should experiment with AI tools to understand their practical value.
• Take a pragmatic approach: While ethical concerns about unlicensed training data and environmental impact are valid, the genie is out of the bottle. If you aren’t at least testing, you diminish your odds of adapting to a changing landscape
• Don’t write it off: Even if you’ve tried before, try again. Tool capabilities evolve rapidly. Also, getting good with new tools takes experimentation, trial and error, and patience.
• Don’t be intimidated: Claude has good documentation that is generally applicable to other LLM models. There are communities sharing knowledge. Getting started is getting easier.
• Play with multiple models: Current leading options include Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4, each with strengths in different tasks.

Experiment

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released the Model Context Protocol (MCP) recently. Essentially, it allows users to provide their own backends for retrieving data to load into a chat context. Someone has already written a Notion server for the protocol, mcp-notion-server, accompanied by a blog post, Operating Notion via Claude Desktop Using MCP!. I focused on Notion since it's one of my primary writing and sharing tools, but there are also official and open source MCP servers for Obsian, Apple Notes, and others.

Success criteria

I would consider this experiment if I am able to

1. Integrate Claude directly within Notion, playing nicely with the latter’s block-based document structure.
2. Alternatively, enable Claude to read and update Notion pages in non-corrupting ways.