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AI-infused
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Posted by satis
Sep 15, 2025 at 05:08 PM
This morning I got an email from Mark Bernstein noting that Tinderbox will now not only work with major AI models but the app will offer workspace to AI models to take notes for itself.
> In recent years, I’ve been outspoken in my criticism of much AI Research,
> but in recent months it has also become clear to me that Large Language
> Models are the most important new technology of our time. With Tinderbox
> 11, you can sit down and discuss your Tinderbox work with an AI….
>
> If you give permission — and only if you do so — AIs such as Claude
> Desktop can see your Tinderbox work and explore it along with you. Of
> greatest interest, the AI itself can have a section of your Tinderbox
> document in which to make its own notes. This allows AIs to work on long
And Momenta has now issued version 21 of Agenda with the new Ask Agenda AI chat assistant, an on-device model that doesn’t use the cloud, and it has access to your Agenda notes. You can ask questions about your notes in everyday language, get links to the most relevant notes in responses, and limit Ask Agenda queries to notes in date ranges.
To ask follow-up Ask Agenda questions, you’ll need to purchase Agenda Premium, which is either a $34.99 annual subscription or a $119.99 one-time purchase.
Posted by Paul Korm
Sep 15, 2025 at 08:56 PM
Working with **all** AI models is not really the case, out of the box, with Tinderbox 11. There’s a built-in MCP to work with Claude Desktop. It’s certainly possible to roll one’s own integration with other models. The Claude one is nice—but Claude is as much a liar as any AI and will gladly take any prompt to do something with a Tinderbox file, and report success, when in fact Claude did nothing at all.
satis wrote:
This morning I got an email from Mark Bernstein noting that Tinderbox
>will now not only work with major AI models but the app will offer
>workspace to AI models to take notes for itself.
Posted by satis
Sep 17, 2025 at 01:16 AM
LLMs definitely aren’t perfect and can make confident mistakes, but they’re still useful tools for brainstorming and exploration as long as you double-check the results and keep their limits in mind. Used with care chatbots can help with drafts or ideas, though fact-checking is always wise. When you consider how blindingly fast the technology has been advancing compared to just five years ago, current shortcomings like overconfidence or “hallucination” are very likely to improve so in the meantime I’d rather see them as helpful tools when used carefully, not something to dismiss entirely because of occasional bad answers, especially in longer conversations where they can lose track of context or misinterpret earlier data.
Paul Korm wrote:
> Working with **all** AI models is not really the case
Agreed, but nobody claimed ‘all’ AI models would be supported.
Posted by eastgate
Sep 24, 2025 at 02:14 PM
Tinderbox 11 uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard to communicate with any compliant LLM. Claude Desktop is the one on which we’ve focused initially, but several other LLMs have adopted or have announced plans to adopts MCP.
An important part of using any LLM is finding tasks in which good performance saves you time, while poor performance causes scant trouble. “Do my homework for me” is a dark pattern; if the LLM does well, you still don’t get much benefit, while if the LLM does a lousy job you’re going to be embarrassed. “Tell me the three best books about Rome in the 2nd century” is better: if it’s right, you have good book recommendations, and if it tells you about books that don’t exist, you’ll find out right away and it’s no big deal.
Posted by satis
Sep 24, 2025 at 07:23 PM
I’ve found LLMs useful in summarizing and evaluating blocks of text I’ve inputted for grammaticality, organization and coherence. And when evaluating multi-thousand word submissions I’m offered suggestions for editing that are orderly and cogent and blend together *ideas* from different sections that surprisingly go together.
But when I’ve asked for suggestions on wholesale rewrites the responses typically lack nuance and sometimes fail to understand context.
I’ve also had multiple experiences where my text contained mistyped or misspelled words, or didn’t finish thoughts or sentences, and the LLMs wrongly inferred what was written, sometimes hilariously or horrifyingly.
And generally, when asked to rewrite passages the results iron out my style to the point of blandness.
But understanding those limitations still lets me get a lot of selective benefit I can work with.