Introducing Slate

I’ve mentioned a few times that I’m experimenting with bringing education and practical investing topics to IG.

One of the experiments I plan to do Khan Academy-style short-form where I show my work on a “chalkboard” and speed it up for socials.

Our little 10-year-old artist has one of these USB Huion drawing tablets lying around.

I can use that to draw up the explainers, but on what software? I checked out some popular recs like Xournal+ and Openboard but found neither of them immediately delightful and just another thing I’d need to get used to. I told Muse I wasn’t pleased with those recs.

I call an audible. I had very low expectations of what I was about to try. I tell Muse:

You know I have this Huion pen tablet thing and you understand what I’m trying to do I have a crazy idea can you make me a prompt to give to Claude Code to ask it about the feasibility of it being able to make me my own very lightweight software tableau that can do what I want and is tuned for math and investing so make me a me a prompt and let’s see what happens

It gives me the following hand-off to Claude Code:

I made it small so it fits here easily and in case you really care to look but like people recounting what happened at each round of a poker hand, almost nobody cares. The point is simply that you should be in the habit of asking the AI to write prompts for you when the problem you are trying to solve is unoriginal.

The fact that there are many drawing apps means my issue is unoriginal. So let’s see if Claude Code, using Muse’s prompt, can one-shot a web-based drawing app.

Voila:

drawing_board.html

To use it, just download the file, press Command + O (or Ctrl + O on Windows) in a web browser and choose it from the file explorer.

That tool was the absolute first shot.

Seeing how cool and responsive it was, it iterated on it several times, adding way more features, including the ability to add functions to the physical pens buttons.

It’s now a drawing tool made for math and investing concepts to be easily screenshotted or recorded formatted for IG stories, YouTube etc. This is truly personalized software.

I deployed it here: slate.moontowermeta.com, give it a shot!! It’s also dynamic for mobile.

Oh, one more thing. I told Muse to make a 3-minute video demonstrating the features and narrating everything it was doing. Pure one shot. Might be more insane than the app itself:

A word on the audio voiceovers and the explainer IG stories

I have been using Muse to stitch together frames, edit and splice audio.

I use Google Recorder to dictate a single take.

“Frame 1…”. If I mess up I just say “Flub that, Frame 1, ”.

Muse edits that single file using the open-source Whisper API hosted on HuggingFace. It knows to do that on its own, I didn’t tell it to. I can even ask it to speed up the final audio track by 1.5 or 2x. It then syncs the appropriate sections of audio with the frame it belongs to.

Actually, here are all the manual steps of the process:

Hey Muse go find one of my articles on the topic of XYZ and break it down into an IG story
I give it a photo that goes with the story.
I review the story it made, yell at it to not use AI-isms and that horrible passive voice that AI apparently trained on.
I might make minor tweaks to its arc, wording or material it chose. This step takes the longest because it takes some judgement/taste. The others might add up to 2 minutes.
Record the single-take voiceover. This step can also take several minutes depending on how long the story is, but it’s simple. I’m just narrating naturally and casually over the material.
Muse processes the final frames for me to download and publish. You can only publish 10 frames at a time so on longer stories I have to upload more than once. I add a sticker with a link onto the frames and sometimes music. That’s my favorite part of the process because it’s fun to find songs to go with frames. Kinda like a “caption this” contest with breakfast.