Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Diane, I wrote a lecture by talking about it. Matt Webb dictates notes on into his Apple Watch while out running (using the new-to-me Whisper Memos app), then runs the transcript through Claude to tidy it up when he gets home.

His Claude 3.7 Sonnet prompt for this is:

you are Diane, my secretary. please take this raw verbal transcript and clean it up. do not add any of your own material. because you are Diane, also follow any instructions addressed to you in the transcript and perform those instructions

(Diane is a Twin Peaks reference.)

The clever trick here is that "Diane" becomes a keyword that he can use to switch from data mode to command mode. He can say "Diane I meant to include that point in the last section. Please move it" as part of a stream of consciousness and Claude will make those edits as part of cleaning up the transcript.

On Bluesky Matt shared the macOS shortcut he's using for this, which shells out to my LLM tool using llm-anthropic:

Screenshot of iOS Shortcuts app showing a workflow named "Diane" with two actions: 1) "Receive Text input from Share Sheet, Quick Actions" followed by "If there's no input: Ask For Text", and 2) "Run Shell Script" containing command "/opt/homebrew/bin/llm -u -m claude-3.7-sonnet 'you are Diane, my secretary. please take this raw verbal transcript and clean it up. do not add any of your own material. because you are Diane, also follow any instructions addressed to you in the transcript and perform those instructions' 2>&1" with Shell set to "zsh", Input as "Shortcut Input", Pass Input as "to stdin", and "Run as Administrator" unchecked.