Give your agent a laboratory, pt. II

Two recent examples of giving Claude Code a laboratory to find the optimal path through some tedious engineering problems: I added an email capture feature to Shiori so you can forward newsletters into your library. But turns out emails suck to parse. Crappy junk headers and footers, tracking pixels, nasty redirect links, long forward chains, etc. So I poked around at some libraries to help with this, but they were all pretty mid. I wondered if I could throw an LLM at the problem and pay a small tax to let computers figure it out. Then I remembered: I am not smarter than a computer at figuring this out! So I told Claude to build a lab for itself to find the highest quality combination of tools and processing steps to extract meaningful content from a wide range of real emails pulled from my inbox. Claude spun up its own benchmarking system and ran through dozens of tests with different filtering mechanisms, html parsing libraries, pixel tracking detection, and header/footer removal. Fo

Two recent examples of giving Claude Code a laboratory to find the optimal path through some tedious engineering problems: I added an email capture feature to Shiori so you can forward newsletters into your library. But turns out emails suck to parse. Crappy junk headers and footers, tracking pixels, nasty redirect links, long forward chains, etc. So I poked around at some libraries to help with this, but they were all pretty mid. I wondered if I could throw an LLM at the problem and pay a small tax to let computers figure it out. Then I remembered: I am not smarter than a computer at figuring