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Posts tagged with "claude"

Early Impressions of Claude Opus 4 and Using Tools with Extended Thinking

Claude Opus 4 and extended thinking with tools.

Claude Opus 4 and extended thinking with tools.

For the past two days, I’ve been testing an early access version of Claude Opus 4, the latest model by Anthropic that was just announced today. You can read more about the model in the official blog post and find additional documentation here. What follows is a series of initial thoughts and notes based on the 48 hours I spent with Claude Opus 4, which I tested in both the Claude app and Claude Code.

For starters, Anthropic describes Opus 4 as its most capable hybrid model with improvements in coding, writing, and reasoning. I don’t use AI for creative writing, but I have dabbled with “vibe coding” for a collection of personal Obsidian plugins (created and managed with Claude Code, following these tips by Harper Reed), and I’m especially interested in Claude’s integrations with Google Workspace and MCP servers. (My favorite solution for MCP at the moment is Zapier, which I’ve been using for a long time for web automations.) So I decided to focus my tests on reasoning with integrations and some light experiments with the upgraded Claude Code in the macOS Terminal.

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Using Simon Willison’s LLM CLI to Process YouTube Transcripts in Shortcuts with Claude and Gemini

Video Processor.

Video Processor.

I’ve been experimenting with different automations and command line utilities to handle audio and video transcripts lately. In particular, I’ve been working with Simon Willison’s LLM command line utility as a way to interact with cloud-based large language models (primarily Claude and Gemini) directly from the macOS terminal.

For those unfamiliar, Willison’s LLM CLI tool is a command line utility that lets you communicate with services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude using shell commands and dedicated plugins. The llm command is extremely flexible when it comes to input and output; it supports multiple modalities like audio and video attachments for certain models, and it offers custom schemas to return structured output from an API. Even for someone like me – not exactly a Terminal power user – the different llm commands and options are easy to understand and tweak.

Today, I want to share a shortcut I created on my Mac that takes long transcripts of YouTube videos and:

  1. reformats them for clarity with proper paragraphs and punctuation, without altering the original text,
  2. extracts key points and highlights from the transcript, and
  3. organizes highlights by theme or idea.

I created this shortcut because I wanted a better system for linking to YouTube videos, along with interesting passages from them, on MacStories. Initially, I thought I could use an app I recently mentioned on AppStories and Connected to handle this sort of task: AI Actions by Sindre Sorhus. However, when I started experimenting with long transcripts (such as this one with 8,000 words from Theo about Electron), I immediately ran into limitations with native Shortcuts actions. Those actions were running out of memory and randomly stopping the shortcut.

I figured that invoking a shell script using macOS’ built-in ‘Run Shell Script’ action would be more reliable. Typically, Apple’s built-in system actions (especially on macOS) aren’t bound to the same memory constraints as third-party ones. My early tests indicated that I was right, which is why I decided to build the shortcut around Willison’s llm tool.

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Beyond ChatGPT’s Extension: How to Redirect Safari Searches to Any LLM

xSearch for Safari.

xSearch for Safari.

Earlier this week, OpenAI’s official ChatGPT app for iPhone and iPad was updated with a native Safari extension that lets you forward any search query from Safari’s address bar to ChatGPT Search. It’s a clever approach: rather than waiting for Apple to add a native ChatGPT Search option to their list of default search engines (if they ever will), OpenAI leveraged extensions’ ability to intercept queries in the address bar and redirect them to ChatGPT whenever you type something and press Return.

However, this is not the only option you have if you want to redirect your Safari search queries to a search engine other than the one that’s set as your default. While the solution I’ll propose below isn’t as frictionless as OpenAI’s native extension, it gets the job done, and until other LLMs like Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Le Chat ship their own Safari extensions, you can use my approach to give Safari more AI search capabilities right now.

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