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Tinker Tuesday for May 13, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is going to be, quite-possibly, a below-illiterate tech question, so please bear with me and save all openly expressed disdain for the end.

I run a small business that makes about $20K a year, as a side hustle. I started soon after AI hit the mainstream and have found the $20 a month tier of ChatGPT to be invaluable for streamlining administrivia type tasks such as boilerplate emails, plus helpful for very early brainstorming and having a minimally effective sales pitch in 15 minutes. I still do some amount of cleaning up for these processes, less for the boilerplate things, more for the creative things. I have trained a couple of GPT’s to be focused on the specific tasks I need them for, and will continue to do so as/if I expand.

My question is, am I missing out on some capability by only using the basic bitch version of GPT? Could I be getting more bang for my buck, better sales emails, better crafted first pass sales pitches, more automation, etc, by changing products? Should I use a different LLM company, or pay for API access, or buy a good GPU and train my own sandslave, or what? Or am I fine where I’m at?

In brief, you're probably fine where you're at. Keep the 80/20 rule in mind, you're already getting a lot of value out of the "basic bitch" level. If upgrading your tool doesn't directly solve a specific problem you're having, I wouldn't. There are infinity arguments for why upgrading could potentially allow you to do more things: if you don't have a plan for exactly what those more things are and how an upgraded LLM fits into that process, don't do it.