Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM?

Re:Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM? by jjice on Friday August 15, 2025 @04:07PM (#44916786)

I like to digitize my handwritten notes. For the basic transcription, there's isn't much prompting to do, but I do tell it some stylistic choices I make and how to interpret those as markdown, like open to-dos as circles and closed to-dos as circles with Xs to their markdown equivalents.

I also upload some common templates for things like my weekly reviews and tell it to use a template if applicable.

I'm sure if I drew diagrams and told it it could use Mermaid, it'd do a good job too. Would like to try when I get the chance.

It saves _so_ much time getting written notes into text. Writing things out helps me plan, but I much prefer to have content digital for syncing, backups, and searching.

This is all in a Claude project for reuse, but I've found most LLMs do a solid job, even the cheap ones like Gemini 2.5 flash (or whatever the low cost current Gemini model is).

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Re:Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM? by mavilia on Saturday August 16, 2025 @03:01PM (#44926049)

I'm curious how clean is your handwriting? I just did a test run with Claude (pro plan) and it could not understand my iPad + iPencil notes. I expected this since they are close to chicken scratch. ChatGPT told me "I ran OCR on your notes, but the handwriting/scan quality makes the transcription pretty rough—lots of words are garbled."

Then I tried a handwritten note that was some of my average handwriting and it did okay-ish. I think it would be acceptable to use if I also store the original note image with the transcribed text and for basic searching.

I agree with you I prefer writing physically but need a system for digitizing.

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Re:Ask HN: What's your most valuable query to an LLM? by jjice on Saturday August 16, 2025 @07:23PM (#44927663)

I'm honestly not sure how my handwriting is - I haven't had someone ready my handwriting anything outside of math or computer science in a decade. I would guess my handwriting is an average man's. Legible, but might take a sec to read at points.

If I have lines that run to the end of the page and stuff gets garbled, Claude does struggle with that and says it added some assumptions in.

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