Today was a wild ride, jumping between completely different worlds. One minute I was getting a reality check on a startup idea, the next I was architecting an LLM solution for a client, and I finished the day by finally fixing a buggy personal project. It’s days like these that really stretch your brain in the best ways.

I started the day with a call with a startup consultant. I wanted to get some feedback on a bigger idea I’ve been kicking around, and it was a great, free way to get an experienced perspective. Then, I had a surprise call where I was the one giving advice on AI. I wrapped up by diving back into my own code.

Here are a few takeaways from the day:

  • Startup Reality Check: Building a startup, especially a B2G (Business-to-Government) one, is no joke. The consultant immediately asked about the business model, market size, sales cycle, and competitor landscape. It’s a good reminder that an idea is just the first 0.1% of the work.
  • From Imposter to Consultant: I found myself advising a team on building a custom chatbot. They were stuffing huge amounts of text into a single prompt and getting bad results. It was a perfect use case for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to pull accurate info from their documents. I also suggested fine-tuning a model to capture a specific person’s writing style. It’s wild to realize my deep dive into this stuff has made me knowledgeable enough to help others.
  • The Scraper Saga is Over: My synagogue YouTube scraper project has been running and freezing for ages. Today, I started fresh. With a little back-and-forth between GPT and Claude, I finally got it working! It’s now successfully pulling all the videos from the target playlists. Feels so good to get that unblocked.
  • …And Hello, Scope Creep: Of course, the moment the scraper worked, my brain immediately jumped to the next thing. Now I want to build a simple local UI to make the scraped videos searchable and add an option to download compressed versions. Every small project just wants to become a big one.

It’s funny how these different activities connect. The high-level startup talk grounds my technical work in business reality, while the hands-on coding keeps my skills sharp. It was also a good confidence boost to be able to provide real value with my LLM knowledge. The day was a reminder that progress isn’t always linear, but it’s happening on multiple fronts.

Next: Time to start building out that local UI for the video scraper.

Tags: llm, startup, python, rag, side-projects, learning-in-public