The Hidden Karpathy Loop That 10x’d My Output – AHK News 2026-05-21

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy %Name%,

On Sunday I had another call with my AI / strategy buddy Ryan Wells.

He’s creating a very interesting tool that is watching his computer usage. 

This may sound a bit “big brother” to you (and it does to me) however I do know it is very hard to figure out the “performance” of something without tracking it.

For nearly 20 years I was a quantitative stats guy that used data to help businesses make better informed decisions.

Now I’m loving that we’re collecting metrics on ourselves to see how we can improve❗

How about you %Name%❓ 

What is your feedback loop that you use to ensure you’re improving❓

If you don’t have an easy way to track your time, you should check out our Time Tracking tool

Also, if you’re a Claude Code user, make sure you run /Insights.  It’s a game changer!

Do you have a time each week where you evaluate yourself to ensure you’re improving “you“❓

Now on with the show…

Learn how to Master VSCode Make the switch to v2 Intro to AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate ObjectsGUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Access all our Courses; Quit when you want

RealizeAHKtimesaving


Easily Magnify your screen

A couple of weeks ago we came up with this really cool Magnifying Glass which let’s you very quickly zoom into a given area of your screen.  You can even adjust either the area being zoomed and the size of the magnification.

Crazy Z-Order issue with AHK GUI

A while back I found a “bug” which I’d never seen before. 

We had a child GUI that, on one computer, showed the child window behind the main GUI but, with the same executable, showed up in front of the main GUIs.

In this video, Irfan explains what we learned.

AutoHotkey GUI Z Order Fix AlwaysOnTop Preferences Window Bug | Hero Extract
AutoHotkey GUI Z Order Fix AlwaysOnTop Preferences Window Bug | Hero Extract


Speaking of Z-order

If you’re new to working with GUIs with AutoHotkey, you might check out this video where I was showing a tool to help capture the Z-order of GUIs.

Developing Z order and Level of Windows
Developing Z order and Level of Windows


My Script isn’t broken, it just looks that way…

Often we might be doing some “work” with AutoHotkey but most people don’t let users know the script is continuing to plug along.  

That’s where our Progress Bar can help easily inform users that the script is actually hard at work!


Improving People’s Lives: Story #97

Monday morning I had an amazing call with Kenneth Aar (an AHK Hero member).

He has his own YouTube channel.  I showed him some of our tools (Like Transcriber and Media Segmenter) but we also had some very interesting discussions that will be a focus of upcoming newsletters.  🙂

BTW, you might enjoy his channel, here’s a brief description of it: 

“Discover the sweet spot where AutoHotkey meets psychology and GTD (Get Things Done) to engineer systems with less friction and more freedom.”


📚 What we’re reading


🤖 AI News that you Need to Know


⚡️Productivity tips:  

Less is more.  

Version One is infinitely better than version None❗


🤣 A spot of Humor:  Jimmy Carr is so funny!

You Dream of Someone This Dumb In The Front Row
You dream of someone this dumb in the front row


Clients say…

THANK YOU, YOU SAVED MY LIFEEEEEEEEEEEEEE — @sillywilly-102


Cartoon superhero mascot in green costume beside the bold text AHK Hero on a yellow background AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.    Currently we have over 566 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
  • Converting the AutoHotkey MCP to CLI (and why)
  • Buttons in Notifyv2 class 👀
  • Our new DiffViewer for AHK Script Maker (It’s way cooler than I planned❗)
  • Using Try/Catch in your code
  • Live Creating Skills and Testing
  • Continue to Automate creating Downloads on the-Automator

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

  • When a man understands that the aim of life is not material profit, but life itself, ceases to fix his attention exclusively on the external world, — Alexis Carrel
  • Fire fast; Hire slow — Dan Kennedy
  • Do the hard jobs first. Easy jobs will take care of themselves — Dale Carnegie

AHK Newsletter⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue?  Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude.  Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here.  We never share your email with anyone.  Ever!


the-Automator  Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff


P.S. We like to think we are “efficient” but the truth is, more often than not, we are incredibly inefficient.  And having “someone else” (whether it is AI or another human) is often the best way to spot places for us to improve. 

How about it %Name%❓  

Do you have the courage to join the hero club and share your workflow❓

 

News 2026-04-23 No tokens. No ongoing costs. Just results❗

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy %Name%,

For the past couple of years we’ve been slowly shifting the focus from teaching how to program in AutoHotkey to how to use AI to program AutoHotkey.

Last week I made it official.

Now our focus is to teach how to use AI to automate the mundane (mainly with AutoHotkey)

The truth is, AI is surpassing most people’s programming abilities. 

I think, in 6 months , AI will have surpassed even the best programmers (in all programming languages).

This is the main reason why we’re now focused on helping people use AI more effectively.

We still focus on AutoHotkey because AutoHotkey is phenomenal at automating Windows programs.

Most people teaching AI automation rely on AI to run the automation.
That works… but it also means you’re always paying every time it runs.

When we use AutoHotkey, we might use AI to build the solution but, once it’s done, it runs for free.

No tokens. No ongoing costs. Just results❗

And results that you don’t have to worry they were hallucinated !

Now on with the show…

Learn how to Master VSCode Make the switch to v2 Intro to AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate ObjectsGUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Access all our Courses; Quit when you want

masteringPopups


How the-Automator is “better” than other people teaching AI

During a hero call Kenneth mentioned he liked the change in our focus (to teaching how to use AI to use AHK) and how most other channels teach AI to “do the work”.

In this short excerpt we talk a bit how AutoHotkey still has a very important place in Desktop Automation / Robotics Process Automation (RPA) but how most people working in AI don’t know what they don’t know.

How our AI Automation Channel is different than other AI channels Hero Extract
How our AI Automation Channel is different than other AI channels Hero Extract


Giving AI Eyes 👀

As I’ve repeatedly said, AI is getting insanely good at programming in AutoHotkey!

Having said that sometimes it “struggles” with simple things like moving an element in a GUI.

I realized if we could let AI “see” the actual X/Y locations of the Win32 controls, it would not have to guess by looking at screen shots. 

In this short video I walk through a quick approach I took for working with AutoHotkey GUIs.

Stop Claude From Guessing Pixels 🔧 This Scanning Tool Changes Everything
Stop Claude From Guessing Pixels 🔧 This Scanning Tool Changes Everything


Zoom Glance Bar is a surprise hit!

Irfan and I spend most of the day in Zoom together.   Often one of us will be either sharing our screens or muted. 

Unfortunately Zoom doesn’t make it super easy to detect if you’ve muted or are sharing your screens.

So we created a simple “Always on top” notification that let’s me both glance at it (so I know if I’m muted, if my webcam is on, and if I am sharing) but I can also click them to toggle each of those things.

You can check it out in this video.

We haven’t released it yet but, from the reaction to people at the meeting, it is bound to be a hit for Zoom users!

🎯 The Zoom Tool That’s Changing How We Work All Day | Hero Extract
🎯 The Zoom Tool That's Changing How We Work All Day | Hero Extract


Claude Profile Manager

Speaking of big hits, this one is no surprise!

Like every other LLM on the planet, Claude has a given context window length.

Keeping your system settings concise & free of bloat can help Claude focus and extend your conversations.  Like Claude.md, Skills, Agents, and MCP Servers.

Check out our Claude Profile Manager that will let you easily switch between different setups.

Session and profile manager for Claude Hero Extract
Session and profile manager for Claude Hero Extract


Improving People’s Lives: Story #92

Earlier this morning I had a call with a new developer that is creating software for Radiologists.  We had a two hour call discussing the best secrets I know about creating software, tracking licensing, marketing, etc. 

He’ll be able to avoid a lot of the mistakes I’ve made over the past 15 years of running my own business.  


📚 What we’re reading


🤖 AI News that you Need to Know


⚡️Productivity tips: In Chrome:

  • Control+Shift+Tab Reopens last Tab
  • Control+Tab Shifts to next tab
  • Control+T Opens new tab
  • Control + W Closes Current tab

🤣 A spot of Humor: Every dentist on the planet❗

every dentist


What we 🅰utomated this week with AutoHotkey #130

In this week’s video I walk you through a whole pile of AI-assisted tools we built with Claude and AutoHotkey.

Think notification systems, a NotebookLM wrapper, an Excel CLI, registry and WMI explorers, plus some slick Zoom controls.

It’s wild how fast you can crank out genuinely useful stuff when AI does the heavy lifting, and I show off a bunch of them in action.

What we Automated with AI and AutoHotkey #130
What we Automated with AI and AutoHotkey #130


Clients say…

I love your scripts because I don’t have to focus on so many things. I just look at the image and rely on muscle-memory. — Michael N. (Radiologist)


Cartoon superhero mascot in green costume beside the bold text AHK Hero on a yellow background AHK Hero 🦸

Consider joining the 🦸Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.    Currently we have over 551 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
  • AHK Script Maker: Fixed tooltips
  • Scintilla Editor AHK v2 Modernization
  • Fast C++ & AHK Windows XP Style Search tool
  • Updates to AHK HotkeyString Lookup
  • Giving eyes to AI
  • Updates to UIA Inspector (now with AI assist)
  • Demonstrating XL.exe (an Excel CLI we made for interacting with Excel)
  • Using Agents in Claude Code
  • Claude Scheduler (maybe not needed because of Claude Routines?)
  • Creating your own Claude Code Commands
  • Using Try/Catch in your code
  • Setting default values in an ini file

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

  • The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside — Sigmund Freud
  • Curiosity can empower or impede you — James Cleary
  • Your strength is measured by what you’ve overcome, not what you’ve avoided — Joe Glines

AHK Newsletter⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue?  Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude.  Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here.  We never share your email with anyone.  Ever!


the-Automator  Dedicated to Multiplying your Income

Joe, Isaias, Irfan and staff


P.S. You may think AI is not up to the task but I 💯% guarantee you that it is!   We’re getting Amazing AutoHotkey code from Claude Opus 4.7.🔥 

Granted we have 38 very well developed Claude skills specifically for building AutoHotkey code!

Join our Hero club and you can check them out!

 

AHK News 2025-07-17 Epic AutoHotkey training for FREE!

AutoHotkey Newsletter

Howdy,

A few week’s back, during a Friday AHK Hero call, we showed clients how they can “pause“ any executable.  I then extracted the video which you can see here.

But wait, that’s not the best part!

When I went to share the above video I tried finding a link on the AHK forum to the code we used.  Surprisingly all I could find was something similar in v1.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was other functionality that we’d want to build-into it.

So I decided to use this as a great way to teach the “right way” to develop code.  (I say that somewhat in jest)….

We outlined pseudo-code about the goals of what we would want to do then Isaias began developing the code explaining his thoughts along the way.

Not only did he teach about writing solid code, he discussed why we would want a class over function as well as other great nuggets.

It turned into an amazing educational session which the attending Hero members thoroughly enjoyed!

In fact, many people mentioned the training session was a “lead magnet” for tutoring as well as “done for you” work because Isaias is “THAT GOOD!”

Don’t believe me, don’t worry; I brought the receipts❗

You can watch the entire session here

Learning To Program in AHK v2 – Amazing lesson from an AHK Hero Extract
Learning To Program in AHK v2 - Amazing lesson from an AHK Hero Extract


Enjoy!   Trust me; you’ll thank me later!

Now on with the show…

Learn how to Master VSCode Make the switch to v2 Intro to AutoHotkey Intermediate AutoHotkey Intermediate ObjectsGUIs are Easy w/AutoHotkey Access all our Courses; Quit when you want

robotsworking

Various ways to Inform Users with GUIs

During an AHK Hero call last week we were asked an interesting question about being able to display information where the “clock” is in the user’s system tray.

This fit really well into a topic we had planned to discuss about the various ways we can present information to a user with GUIs.  I extracted the clip here.

One way we prefer is to use our AHK v2 NotifyClass.

What are your options to Inform users: And which one should you use & When to use them
What are your options to Inform users: And which one should you use & When to use them


Finding Variables in a Complex GUI

During another AHK hero call, a hero member was asking about finding the location of a variable in the amazing FindText Function.

Isaias talked through the “right way” to do this however I also showed how, by using a word boundary with RegEx, it can also be done very quickly.

Check it out here and you tell me; Which way do YOU prefer❓

Finding Variables in a Complex GUI
Finding Variables in a Complex GUI


When did you find AutoHotkey❓

A while back I happened to find “Robotype” which was the tool I used for HotStrings before I found AutoHotkey.   I looked up when the version I had was released and it gave me a better idea when I started using AutoHotkey.

I also talk through how I was using Hotkeys way before AutoHotkey.

Check it out in this video.

How long have you been using AutoHotkey?   And what tool did it replace for you❓

How & When I started using AutoHotkey / Automation
How & When I started using AutoHotkey / Automation


Easily Unsubscribe from emails in Gmail

Gmail recently added a new service to make it easier to unsubscribe to emails.

I show just how easy it is in this video.

Googles New Manage subsriptions tool
Googles New Manage subsriptions tool


Improving People’s Lives: Story #56

This week Irfan finished merging together our client’s separate ahk scripts that Automated the French and English version of a program.

We used to have two, completely separate AutoHotkey files & git repositories.

This meant it was a lot of work to maintain because, any update we made on one, had to be made on the other.

Now, that all GOES AWAY!

And, more importantly, their customers now get to use the same ahk program regardless of the language they are using (oh, btw we also added Spanish❗)

Huge game changer for our client and their customers!


What we’re reading


AI / Chat GPT-3 News / Usage


⚡️Productivity tips:

In VS Code you can hit Ctrl+\ to Split the editor


A spot of Humor: Pretty funny!

Donald Trump on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
Donald Trump on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire


What we utomated this week with AutoHotkey #93

This week I walked through some cool things I did both with AI and manually with Search/Replace in MS Word.

You can check it out in this video.

93 What we Automated with AutoHotkey #93

93 What we Automated with AutoHotkey #93


Client’s say…

“You guys changed my life! Thanks man” — Marrion Mentoor


Cartoon superhero mascot in green costume beside the bold text AHK Hero on a yellow background AHK Hero

Consider joining the AHK Hero club! Members receive 25% off courses, consultations, tutoring, done for you project work, etc.    Currently we have over 436 hours of recordings teaching AutoHotkey that is exclusive to AHK Hero members❗

You can watch 1 hour a day for a year and not repeat content! That’s a lot of AHK Learning!

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

  • Help AHK Hero Members with their Questions & Code
  • Craziest ways to control your game
  • Finish Suspender Class
  • Using MARK: comments in VScode for minimap (User interface)
  • Update to Clipster– wait for clipboard format
    • Need to fix the file copy and RTF
  • Debug configuration – Switching between scripts in VS Code
  • Making a non-Editable field, editable
  • Aggregating Time (hours, minutes, seconds)

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


️ Quotable quotes

  • Time is linear; Success doesn’t have to be — Joe Glines
  • If every request is a five alarm fire, it’s your house that’s gonna go up in flames — Amy Landino
  • The thing most people like least is a mirror — Dan Kennedy

AHK Newsletter⏩SHARE WITH A FRIEND⏩

Do you know someone that would benefit from learning useful automation tips like the gems in today’s issue?  Take a second and forward this newsletter and bask in the glow of their undying gratitude.  Was this email forwarded to you?

Sign up for this Newsletter here.  We never share your email with anyone.  Ever!


The-Automator

Joe, Isaias, Irfan, Denilson and staff


P.S.  The AHK Hero club is an amazing value for people like you!

The first month is $1.99 so check it out!  I guarantee you’ll love it!