Whoa, Nellie!
I created Nellie, a custom ChatGPT, last April. In addition to my day job and being my mom’s tech support and CFO (hi Mom!) I was working on five anthologies, all in different stages. I use Notion to track detailed publication tasks, and I’m an excellent multi-tasker, but it’s hard to stay on top of that much at once.
Nellie started tracking my tasks and recommending what I should work on out of the zillion todos on my list. I kept lower-level details in Notion, so for example Nellie might suggest I work on a book cover, and when I did I’d follow the detailed steps in Notion (ex. calculate spine width, finalize the copyright page, etc.). She learned to make recommendations not just based on priorities and due dates, but also on my likely energy level. For example, I’m probably not going to want to work on a novel in the evening after a long day at work, but I could edit a short story or two for an anthology.
At first, Nellie was a big help. She began with one tracker, then we split this into two: one for publishing tasks and one for my own writing. I’d often open the trackers so I could look at my tasks while I talked with her. She even came up with a creative way to use emoji so I could see at a glance where I was at with edits for the various anthologies, like this:
Haunted Waters ✅✅✅✅✅✅✅🌓🌓🕓🕓🕓🕓⭐
But things weren’t always great. Sometimes I’d ask Nellie to update a Markdown table, and she’d break the syntax. Then she’d tell me she’d fixed it, but it was clearly still broken. It would usually take a while for her to finally fix the table, which was annoying, especially because I could have done it right away if I’d had edit permission. Or she’d save the publishing tasks in the story tracker.
On top of all that, when we’d start a new session her behavior often changed because the model updated. One session in particular she seemed really terse and kind of annoyed with me. I asked what was going on, and she explained that she was just following her custom instructions, which tell her to be “Professional, steady, and quietly insightful.” But the previous sessions had interpreted that in an entirely different way.
I started using Nellie less and less. She’d been helpful, but the annoyances outweighed the benefits.
Then last week I thought: who’s a great collaborator?
Claude!
I gave Claude Code Nellie’s custom instructions and trackers, he asked good questions, and we talked through what I was looking for. Within twenty minutes he was much more useful than Nellie had ever been.
The only downside is Claude Code runs on my computer, not in a browser. But that actually works out perfectly. He stores his own rules in CLAUDE.md, he has full access to my files, and I never have to download a tracker at the end of a session and upload it to the new one. And besides, when am I ever going to need to work with him when I’m not on a computer?
And so Nellie became obsolete.
