Howdy,

I just watched David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World. DHH created Ruby on Rails, and holy cow, DHH is FIRED UP about AI. 🚀

But what grabbed me first wasn’t the AI part. It was a story about Artists.

Back in the 1700s, getting your portrait done meant sitting for hours in front of a master painter, then waiting months for the finished piece. Only the rich and royal could afford it.

In 1886, Danish painter Laurits Tuxen spent THREE YEARS on one painting of the royal family.

Then in 1900, Kodak released the Brownie camera. It cost about a dollar, and suddenly regular people could get their picture taken.

Imagine being a portrait painter back then. Your whole career was capturing people as realistically as possible… and a one-dollar box just did it faster and at a fraction of the price.

That had to be the end of art, right?

It turns out it was the opposite ❗

Painters stopped trying to copy reality and started exploring. Picasso chased Cubism. Tuxen and the Skagen painters moved toward Impressionism.

We got an EXPLOSION of creativity 👀

Because the old job went away and artists had to find new ways to express themselves.

Sound familiar?

DHH sees the same thing happening right now with AI.

Last November, AI coding tools got good enough that people could build real software just by describing it. DHH hasn’t written code by hand in months and is more productive (and happier) than ever.

The advice: don’t mourn the old way. Look back on it with joy, then get excited about what’s next.

A line DHH first used back in 2005 fits better than ever: “Look at all the things I’m not doing.”

How about you? Are you looking at AI like a painter staring at the first camera? Or like a painter who just got permission to try something completely new?

I’ll leave you with DHH‘s energy, because I share it.

Every dream, every annoyance, every “someday” idea is now within reach❗

I’m with DHH on this one. 🤖⚡

BTW: If you don’t have an hour to spare for his entire speech, I made this video with NotebookLM capturing many of his ideas.

Now on with the show…

Stop Paying Hosting Fees for your Website

I was having an interesting discussion with Claude the other day and it mentioned this fascinating way to host an incredibly safe, lightning fast website for free.

You can read the detailed plan here or watch this video to get the concept.

Stop Paying Monthly Website Fees Forever 💰

Discussing more about Jev

During our Hero call last week we had a great discussion about using Jev.

Having a background in Marketing Research and having developed questionnaires for ~20 years, I had some interesting insights on how to better use the tool.

Check it out in this video.

How Jev is different than other LLMs and how to use it correctly

Using AI to Clean-up Audio

Ffmpeg is an incredible tool❗ We use it as the foundation of a lot of our tools that work with Audio/video.   It has built-in functionality to “clean” your audio (removing hum, voice leveling, etc.), which is handy. However, in this video I demonstrate how superior AI is at cleaning up noise.

I also covered removing audio hum with FFmpeg and AI tools in an earlier Hero extract if you want to see more.

If you’re interested, check out ClearCut here.

Comparing AI Audio Filters to FFmpeg Options | Hero Extract

Some Brilliant AI Debugging Agent Tips 👀

During a hero call Isaias walks us through his incredible AI strategy for developing code and debugging.  This video is an amazing peek into a very advanced approach for using AI.

You don’t want to miss this one❗

AI Context Hacks for Smarter Debugging 💡 | Hero Extract

Improving People’s Lives: Story #116

Today I helped myself❗

I’ve been writing this newsletter for 6 years now.

Every week I open my Newsletter template file, write an intro, then navigate to the relevant folder (organized by Year\Month) and save it for the respective Thursday.

This of course means I need to know which Thursday it is, and it forces me to type out the date.

Today I asked Claude to generate blank template files in the folders for me up through 2028.

For example, for October 8^th it created 2026-10-08-xxxxx.docx

Now, when I write that newsletter I’ll still start with my Newsletter template, then navigate to October’s folder and save it over that file (and will replace the xxxxx with the topic)

This will save me about 1.5 minutes each week (for the next 117 weeks) but I’ll put that time to good use. You can count on that❗   (baby steps to freedom)

📚 What we’re reading

• How to stop your Android phone from checking location 500+ times daily
• This forgotten SATA trick made my cheap old SSD feel brand new
• I’ve used PuTTY for years, but this open-source SSH app replaced my 3-tool setup

🤖 AI News that you Need to Know

• Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 5.5
• OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna
• Ollama 0.35.0 adds “decision models” for local classification

⚡️Productivity tips:   The “Not Now” list

When an unrelated idea pops up, write it down instead of acting on it.

This preserves the idea without letting it hijack your current task.

🤣 A spot of Humor:  Some pretty funny scares here…

What we 🅰utomated this week with AutoHotkey #150

I recorded this one from Vegas, and it was a busy week❗

I show you Jev, a little AI tool that picks the right program from a list and tells you how confident it is.

I also show AutoHotkey versions of my Wi-Fi repair and PC health check tools, a Gemini voice tool that generates podcast-style conversations, and a Nemotron diarizer that labels speakers in long recordings right on your own PC.

In this week’s video I walk you through all of them, along with a personal info scrubber, some Rust fuzzy search benchmarks that blow pure AHK out of the water, and a macro recorder built on UIA.

Clients say…

Joe! All I can say is WOW! — Stephanie Holland

AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.    Currently we have over 613 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to Hero members❗

During this Friday’s call we’re planning to discuss:

• Help Hero Members with their Questions & Code
• Hosting your website for free
• AHK Tools
  • TextUnderMouse Now gets paths & code 
  • WatchFolders example
  • Jev Decider Example (Local and API Call)
  • USP Coach
  • Fix My Internet
  • Monitor Layout
  • WebP lib
  • PC Health Check
  • PC Setup
  • Personal Info Scrubber
  • Prevent Wake
  • Windows Tracer
  • vRam Monitor / prog Killer
  • Issue with cjson lib for v2 beta❓
• LLM
  • New Diarizer from Nvidia: Nemotron 3 – reverse approach
  • New AI models: Sonnet 5.5, Jev, Astra, Grok 4.7

They also have access to exclusive & pre-released content and 3 hours a week where we help people with their automation issues (the Saturday calls are geared towards people new to Automation with AI)

🗣️ 💭 Quotable quotes

• If you have time to whine then you have time to find a solution — Dee Dee Artner
• The essentials of happiness are to have something: to do, to love, to hope for, to be needed for— Joe Glines
• Tip twenty percent. If you’ve never worked in a job where you had to be nice to rude people, tip even more. You won’t start a trend, but you will make someone’s day and generate good karma — John Carlton

⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

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the-Automator  Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff

P.S. The intro mentioned David Heinemeier Hansson’s video.

It’s an hour long but I highly recommend you watch the entire thing.  It was wonderful❗ (thanks for sharing it @Thomas)