Where do I start with family history?
On the episode I called family history my favourite use of AI so far. You don’t need a special tool. I use a frontier model and the free record sites.
- In your AI account’s settings, turn off training on your data before you share any family documents.
- List the family members you already know about, starting with those no longer living.
- Dig out every document you have about them: certificates, letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings. A cutting can show where someone lived or what they did for work.
- Give the model those documents and ask where to look next. It reads old handwriting remarkably well.
- Check every find against the record itself. At least half of what you turn up will be false positives.
Don’t leave it until you retire. Talk to your relatives while you still can. When I tell my parents what I’ve found, it brings back childhood memories they had lost.
Tin Chest’s guides go step by step: how to get started, how to trace your family for free, and why AI invents ancestors.
Which stack works best with agents?
I made the case for Rails on the show. My defaults:
- A static site: Astro.
- A web service: Rails.
- Anything that does not have to be a web service: a local app, in Tauri.
In my view, agents like convention, and Rails has plenty of it. Plotbeacon tracks UK planning applications. I built it in other frameworks first, then rebuilt it in Rails. Outside Rails I was burning time and tokens on problems Rails had already solved. I also know Rails well, so I can review what the agents write.
Too much software went to the cloud and onto a subscription. If something does not have to be SaaS, I build it to run locally. Resurface could have been a cloud service. Instead it searches your footage on your own machine.
Is Lowdown just a Claude prompt?
Lowdown publishes short briefings on topics in the news. As I said on air, it began by accident, with a Claude prompt. In February I had no time to follow what was happening in Iran, so each day I asked Claude what was going on. I mentioned it in a few nomad groups and offered to paste the answers in. They went down well, and people messaged me about them. But run the same prompt tomorrow and it retells half of today’s answer, and nothing checks it.
Lowdown prefers first-party sources, such as government press releases. Story threads record what each briefing has already reported, so the next one covers what changed. Every person, company and place it mentions gets a profile, with a timeline and links to the others.
It runs like a newsroom. An editor-in-chief agent manages 21 departments, including a legal desk that can veto a briefing. I wrote up how they fit together in How Lowdown works.
In April it reported that 125 GW of projects were queuing to connect to Britain’s grid. In September it counted again, could not reproduce the figure, and published a correction.
Why host everything in Europe?
My short answer on the episode was sovereignty. Everything I run is hosted by European providers, from the CDN to the servers. I wanted to show that it can all run outside the US. The trade-offs are some missing features and more to manage yourself. I wrote up the move in On the European stack.
It runs across three providers. Hetzner in Germany and OVH in France split the work between them, and either can take over if the other goes down. A backup copy sits at Civo in the UK. The database streams its write-ahead log to object storage continuously, so I can restore it to any moment. When Claude deleted Plotbeacon’s production database, I restored it to a point ten minutes before the deletion. Claude could only do that because I had given it access to production. Big no-no.
Do you worry about AI’s environmental cost?
Yes, as I said on the episode. I use a lot of AI, so I follow its impact through Lowdown, which tracks data centres. The sources I use are in The numbers behind the AI questions, which also covers water and jobs.
Lowdown follows the story in Data Centres: Boom and Backlash and AI: Jobs, Power & Money. Giant Robots covered energy in 616 with Dr Victoria Plutshack and layoffs in 606, “AI layoffs are BS”.
Where next?
We ran short of time on the show. Here is what comes next:
- Lowdown: raw data pulled straight from the source, plus one-off reports and trend spotting.
- Plotbeacon: more councils, and more help checking your own plan before you apply.
For family history, Tin Chest’s free guides pick up from the steps above.
Everything else I am building is on the work page.
How do I get in touch?
Email hello@bannermedia.ltd about consulting, a technical problem, or anything on this page that is wrong.
I’m also on LinkedIn.