A lil' reflection on my mini-break | #324
Claude code changed me, and I don't regret it
Almost two months and no one has emailed me saying I owe them fresh content.
This is the longest break I’ve taken from writing this newsletter since the birth of my daughter three years ago. It wasn’t the contemplative kind of break I would often take early in my journey, but it was still refreshing. It was a useful practice to take a step back and assess all the various projects I’m involved in and figure out where I should be spending my time in the future.
This mini-sabbatical also coincided with a few other big life events.
First, I’m participating in a five-month experimental travel group called the traveling village.
We are in the second location, in Taiwan, and have really enjoyed the experience so far. We spent the first five weeks in Vietnam and it’s been a possibility-expanding trip. The payoff to having other families who are location-independent around is pretty amazing, it’s something we’ve been missing for a couple of years. Right now, we’re living with another family in the same house with a four- and six-year-old overlooking the ocean, with nine other families within a three minute walk. It’s convinced me that hyper co-location is a cheat code for taking the stress away from having young kids. It turns out the “village” idea basically works, it just takes quite a bit to get others onboard.
More thoughts on this soon but please send me questions.
Second, Angie Wang 安吉 book, Made in Taiwan, was released in traditional Chinese in Taiwan last week.
This has been a huge project for her, and I can say with complete confidence that I think she nailed it. With the help of AI translation tools, I was lucky to be able to collaborate with her on the developmental editing. This was certainly a challenge as I probably pushed her a bit too hard at points, but every time I did, she would come back with a rewrite that blew me away. I am lucky to be married to Angie and am always amazed at how she continues to grow and never gives up despite the challenges she faces. We are currently working together on an English translation too, which will come out later this year.
In the meantime, you can grab a copy to gift to the person in your life that reads traditional Chinese. Or, you know, you can buy it too, because there are no laws against you buying a book you can’t read:
Finally, we have to talk about Claude Code.
Right before I took this little break, I had a call with Alex Dobrenko` , a fellow tinkerer and writer I’ve known since the dog days of the pandemic. The call we had was mind-blowing and I especially appreciated how Alex is approaching using the tool as a creator-first, not as a hustle bro telling everyone “you’re already late.”
This is an unsolicited ad for Alex’s resources on codeforcreatives.com - Alex is a genuinely nice and generous person and creative force and excellent writer. It’s been cool to see him find his thing and be so excited about this, so go there and support him or set up a call if you want to be Claude Code pilled.
I had dabbled with Cursor and Claude Code a bit last year but they never worked and I’d always face too many roadblocks to executing any of the projects I’ve wanted to work on.
But this time really is different. With the new models and UX upgrades, Claude Code, whether in the app or command line, is one of the most powerful tools I’ve ever used. In increasing leaps of boldness, I’ve passively executed on a number of projects in some of the free time I had due to the the efficiencies of scale of traveling with many other families whose kids want to play with my daughter:
#1 A health dashboard: I have a folder of my lifetime health records, and for the first time, Claude was able to easily build me a custom dashboard where I can notice issues, and also brainstorm any problems I’m having based on all this information as context. I suspect everyone will have something like this within a year or two.
#2 Blog Rebuilds: Completely transferred three of my sites, pmillerd.com, angiecreates.io, and strategyu.co, to a static site, each in about 4-5 hours of work: I published a skill on my process here.
#3 Teachable Clone: After doing StrategyU blog rebuild, I started thinking: could I replace Teachable, which was hosting my online course? Part of the reason I wanted to attempt this was that the platform literally hadn’t made any meaningful upgrades in years, and the tracking I was doing for ads didn’t work at all anymore. In less than ten days, I went from tweet to launch.
The final stack was mostly free dev tools: Next, React, Typescript, Convex, Mux, Posthog, Resend + Stripe. It sounds complex but for someone who’s been dancing around these tools for years but could never quite do anything meaningful, it all sort of clicked and fell into place. I just migrated all users and downgraded my Teachable subscription yesterday.
#4 Publishing Chinese EPUBs and Print Books: Angie is self-publishing her book in Taiwan. We have a partner helping with print distribution in Taiwan but had to setup the EPUB and print-on-demand versions everywhere else. This was much more challenging than I expected because Traditional Chinese is typically read right to left, top to bottom. A typical page looks like this:
It turns out that the support for this style EPUB is not very widespread and many books in Taiwan don’t even do it because of technical limitations!
Claude Code to the rescue. Over a couple of weeks I was able to:
Reformat a beautiful EPUB as seen above, 100% via code, keeping the original text intact as well, including custom versions for Apple, Kobo, and Readmoo.
Produce a .docx version for Amazon Kindle, as they don’t support vertical Chinese yet, and
I was able to solve 3-4 gnarly PDF issues on documents we needed to submit for print-on-demand to IngramSpark and Lulu
The crazy thing about these things is that in the past they would all require specialized paid contractors to execute. I estimate we likely saved $1000-$2000 by doing all these things on our own (not to mention made a better product).
#5 Then, I shipped a website in Chinese without fully knowing the language, all via Claude Code, building out a bunch of cool features, like automated testimonials and a smooth process for digital book gifting based on a code.
#6 Finally, a fun experiment, an agentic Store for My Books: Half-joking, half-serious, I decided to launch a store for agents to buy my book:
Anthropic is supposedly going to pay out $3,000 per book that they pirated, so I want to make sure these big labs have the chance to grab my book for a little cheaper:
It’s clearly the way the web is going, designing interfaces, APIs and processes that enable agents to interact with your products and work. Shopify has recently just made agentic shopping a live feature in the last week. So all you need to do is tell your agent to come to my site and follow the simple instructions:
Browse the catalog at https://agent.pathlesspublishing.com/api/catalog
To purchase, POST to https://agent.pathlesspublishing.com/api/purchase with:
{
“slug”: “the-pathless-path”,
“email”: “YOUR_EMAIL”,
“buyerType”: “personal”
}
This returns a Stripe checkout URL. Open it to complete payment.When the purchase is made, it automatically injects a license and hash in the EPUB, MD, and JSON files with terms and specific instructions on how to use the book and how to source it (encouraged).
While this was a fun little experiment (it took 3 hours to code up) it made me realize that there is probably a lot more potential in publishing to build a new stack for selling books, especially for indies like me who won’t be slowed down by traditional publishers. This also makes me incredibly bullish on digital formats of books, mostly because they will be easier to acquire and self-DRM tools will be easier than ever to use. Likely more on this throughout the year
I’m feeling very energized
While it looks like I was working a lot, it really didn’t feel like that. Most of the above projects with Claude Code did NOT take much focused energy. I dabbled on them here and there, during naps, at night, and in 2 or 3 focused work sessions. It certainly required strong basic foundational knowledge of the various tools I was using, but that is something I had in spades after years of tinkering and having fun online.
For someone like me, who doesn’t want to grind my way to success, these tools are incredibly powerful. They remove so much friction and annoyance from launching digital experiments, sites, and products, that I’m rethinking many of the things I thought I’d never do. On top of that, I’m really thinking deeply about what work means in this new reality. This way of working is definitely going to change knowledge work, but I need to think a bit more about it.
Personally, my mind is overflowing with ideas and feeling more open and excited than I have been in a while.
Do sabbaticals always work this way? Aligning with what the universe is ready to tell you? It certainly seems like that sometimes and based on what many of you have shared, it does..
With the publication of Angie’s book it also feels like a new chapter is finally starting.
The past two years have been incredibly hard for me. I’ve been doing a lot of childcare, by choice, and really been enjoying it. But man oh man, has it been a growth experience. I’ve had to grow emotionally, learn how to ask for what I need in my relationship, and also learn to feel the feelings that are easy to suppress when you are trying to hold it together for everyone else.
Angie’s book was something I really believed in and felt was an important core project for our family, despite it being something that may not bring financial rewards. I am glad we oriented our family and life around it. Taking a step back from my work since Good Work was published in October 2024 has been an interesting experience. I’ve definitely found the limit of not enough work and it’s cemented my belief that the right amount of childcare for a parent is not 100% and the right amount of work is not 0% either. The balance is somewhere in the middle.
Through the traveling village, a year of nomadic living, working closely with Angie on a creative project, stepping up as a dad, and growing as a family, I am starting to feel more confident about how the next chapter of our life may unfold.
But as always, it is exactly that, an unfolding.
But after this break, I actually feel like I'm letting things unfold again rather than trying to take off the wrapper by force.
That’s it for today and I’m incredibly grateful for you all.
Keep dreaming big, taking chances, and moving toward the life that matters to you.
See you soon.
-Paul
P.S. I have been having a lot of issues with Substack delivery over the last six months, and I’ve been having large unexpected unsubscribes after sending each issue. It’s been weird, though I may have found the source of the issue. I had my subdomain for substack “proxied” on my DNS which Claude tells me might have flagged my domain for months. If you have had any issues receiving my email or are seeing this one for the first time in a while, let me know. Hopefully everything is fixed now.
Yo.
I’ve been doing some form of public writing since 2015. I’ve somehow figured out how to hack a living doing things like writing books and launching premium art editions of my book. If you like what you read here, you’ll probably enjoy my books The Pathless Path and Good Work:
If you’d like to join a virtual community of others on “pathless paths” from around the world, and get access to courses, tools, and other resources I’ve created over the years, you can join The Pathless Path Community. Our recent WhatsApp community is very active if you like hanging out on messaging apps instead of Circle.
Some things I endorse:
Readwise is offering 2 months free (I use it for book notes and reviewing highlights). Or two months free on
Readwise Reader, which I use for RSS reading and epub reading
Crowdhealth, an alternative to US health insurance that I’m still using while abroad
Postbridge: A social scheduling app created by a reader without crazy upcharges for more accounts
Kindred, a home-sharing app
Collective for handling your S-Corp accounting needs, and Nat Eliason’s Build Your Own AI Apps course
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oh man, the agentic store for books is an exciting experiment. would love to learn how that goes in a few months!
it's been so exciting to see you so excitedly move in the last few months!