update on my use of Claude

I’ve paid for a Pro plan for a year. At the end of that year I will do a thorough reassessment, and will not renew unless I can (a) identify significant ongoing needs, (b) continue to believe that Anthropic is not quite as corrupt as the other AI kaiju, and (b) reconcile my use with the energy and water demands of Anthropic’s datacenters. So my default is not to renew; I’ll need strong evidence to override the default. I grew up spending a good deal of time with a much older cousin of mine in Cullman, Alabama named Claude Basenburg. A hefty, hearty good ol’ boy in overalls, with a wad of tobacco in his cheek. So when I visit claude.ai I don’t think of an omniscient counselor, I just envision my cousin from Cullman. It helps. No LLM will ever write so much as one word for me, though I do continue to allow it to clean up transcribed text from my voice recordings, e.g., getting rid of fillers and repetitions. Here’s a prompt I recently gave Claude Code, after pointing it at my folder of…