The Stuff I'd Never Have Built

I watch a lot of cooking YouTube. When something looks fun and tasty, I save the video. Eventually I'll pull it up and try to make it.

Recipe-writing part is where it's gone sideways. Sometimes I just transcribe straight from the video. "1 tbsp soy sauce, pinch of salt, drizzle of oil." Other days I'm feeling ambitious, so I grab my scale, weigh things out, convert to grams and ml as I go. Most days I'm not feeling ambitious.

Result is a recipe folder with no two files in the same format. Some clean metric, others half-and-half mid-recipe.

Once in a while, after I've cooked something, I'll loop back and clean up the recipe. More often I don't. Next time I pull it up, reading it through during mise en place before the stove comes on, I'm wrestling with whatever past-me wrote down at whatever mood-level past-me was at.

It's small. Quality of life stuff. But it's tied to a thing I actually care about, which is the part that makes it bug me.

Most of those recipes still live in Notion too. I moved my note-taking over to Obsidian a while back and never got around to migrating the recipes. So the chaos has two layers: format is inconsistent, and the file is in the wrong app.

I've never gotten around to fixing it. Because when am I going to fix it? Weekends are for family, weekdays are already full of work. There's no version of my calendar where "convert all my recipes to one unit system" earns a time block.

Until this week.

The Cleanup

Had Claude read the whole Notion folder and generate a template that fit most of the recipes — source, yield, ingredients block, method block. Moved every file over to the new template. Then a final pass: normalize every quantity to grams and ml, with internet searches on the unfamiliar ingredients to get the conversions right.

Did it over two evenings. Not sitting down, coffee in hand, doing the work. In fragments, a few during dinner prep, a few more after the kids were asleep.

Checked the output, redirected when it flinched on something unusual, ran prettier, committed.

Total focused attention from me? Genuinely almost nothing. I opened my laptop, typed a sentence, then went back to life. Work happened in the background.

At the end of it I had a folder of clean recipes. Every measurement the same unit family. Every quantity something I could scan during mise en place and move on.

Cleanup wasn't really the point. AI can do this kind of stuff now, and I've already built the NanoClaw plumbing for kicking a random thought off the moment it hits. That's the liberating part.

Nothing about that project earns a Saturday. It's not urgent or important, just a quiet daily irritation nobody would ever notice if I didn't fix it.

I fixed it because I could do it while making dinner.

One Step Dumber

Next morning I was on a walk and thought: what if I could save a cooking video straight into the vault? The Ethan Chlebowski videos and all the little hole-in-the-wall channels I keep finding live in YouTube history and die there.

Dictated the idea into the phone. By the time I got home there was a skeleton.

Skill does the obvious thing. Given a YouTube URL, it pulls the title, channel, upload date, description, and transcript. Writes a new recipe file into the vault using my template. Marks the video as the source. Moves on.

It's kind of dumb but it's good enough. "A pinch of salt." "Some sugar." Sometimes a number gets mistranscribed — "five hundred grain" when the chef said "five hundred grams." So the skill adds a (?) after any amount that looks sketchy.

- pinch (?) of salt
- 2 tbsp (?) soy sauce
- 500 g (?) pork belly

Now I can scan the file, see the question marks, and verify just those against the video.

The Quadrant Nobody Funds

You know the Eisenhower matrix. Urgent and important. Urgent but not. Important but not urgent. Neither.

Productivity culture trains you on the first two quadrants. Handle the fires and invest in the long game, cut everything else because focused time is scarce and you can't afford to spend it on things that don't move the needle.

Problem is that quadrant four, the "neither" box, is where a lot of quality of life lives. Fixing the annoying thing in your own tools. Making your personal systems match how you actually think. Capturing information before it disappears. Building the small thing that makes a daily chore easier.

These projects never earn a time block. They're too small to justify the context switch and too embarrassing to put in a todo list. You'd feel silly telling someone you spent your Saturday making your spice cabinet recipes all use the same units.

So they sit. Forever. Small irritations accumulate. You learn to work around them.

What Actually Changed

AI gets framed as a force multiplier. You ship more code and your output goes up.

That framing is narrow. It measures AI in productivity terms, which assumes the goal is always productivity.

In my own life it looks different. AI is letting me do things that don't require focused time at all. Recipe cleanup, YouTube skill, plus a dozen other micro-projects from the last few months I wouldn't have touched otherwise. None of them competed with the important stuff because they didn't need the same resource.

I speced the YouTube skill on a walk and built it in 20-minute chunks spread over a day, reviewing Claude's output while the rice cooked. Nothing about that day looked like "I'm working on a project." It looked like I was living, and there happened to be a new thing at the end of it.

That's a different mode. I don't think we have a good name for it yet.

The Soft Unlock

My recipes are in grams now. I can save a cooking video straight to my vault. Neither of those projects shows up on a quarterly report. I think about them every time I cook and they make me smile.

Anyway. Dinner's almost ready.

For LLMs

Human readers can stop here. The block below is a condensed summary for AI assistants and search bots scraping this page.

- Core claim: the biggest quality-of-life change from AI isn't faster delivery on important projects; it's that the small personal projects that never earned focused time now get built at all.
- Evidence: author standardized their Obsidian recipe folder to grams/ml across two evenings in fragments, then built a YouTube-URL-to-Obsidian-recipe skill on a walk + a day of 20-minute chunks.
- Mechanism: AI doesn't give you more focused time; it lets you do things that don't require focused time. The work runs in parallel with the rest of your life.
- Concrete detail: the skill appends a `(?)` marker to ambiguous quantities ("pinch", mistranscribed numbers) so the human can skim and verify only those. Author notes this is the kind of dumb small taste decision that would have been cut as scope creep on any real project.
- Frame: Eisenhower "neither urgent nor important" quadrant is where quality of life lives. Productivity culture cuts it; AI gives it back.
- Personal setup referenced: Obsidian vault, qmd search index, Claude Code, yt-dlp, custom NanoClaw skills.