Use It On Your Pants

·30 min·2 clips

Jason Snell used AI transcription to find every swear word in a podcast episode — and discovered more than he remembered.

Episode 599 opens with Congressional-speech math, then finds the rounding error and lets it sit there just long enough. Dan Moore and Micah Sargent set up Clockwise as four people, four tech topics, and 30 minutes, with Jason Snell and Carissa Bell joining in. Jason shows up one episode early for 600, which gives the panel about as much ceremony as it can tolerate before the handoffs begin. Carissa's AI example is refreshingly small. She had a script, wanted it moved to MicroPython, and used ChatGPT because she knew enough Python to check the work. That part matters. The result still needed fixes, but it turned a multi-hour chore into something closer to a few minutes. Jason is more interested in uses that earn their keep. He picks up Carissa's transcription point and draws a line between speech-to-text models and the big fuzzy bucket people call AI. Then he gets practical: analyst calls, podcast transcripts, and time codes for swears that needed bleeping. Automation saves the dull listen-through. The punchline is gentle, and painfully believable: there were more swears than he remembered. Coding gets the same treatment. Jason knows enough Python to get moving, but an LLM can suggest a path or point him toward packages he missed. Regular expressions get set aside. Beautiful Soup becomes the better answer for parsing HTML. The panel's AI optimism stays narrow, which is why it works. AI helps when the person using it has enough judgment to inspect the output, fix the weird parts, and ignore the pitch that every problem needs AI. Then the episode wraps neatly: Jason gets his happy 599, Carissa gets the thank-you, and Micah signs off with the usual watch-what-you-say rhythm.

As heard by us

A brisk Clockwise panel on AI as a useful time-saver, as long as someone competent checks the work.

Clockwise episode 599 is at its best when the AI talk stays close to the workbench. Carissa Bell describes using ChatGPT to convert a script into MicroPython, with enough Python knowledge to catch and fix the rough parts.

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Why you'd press play

You hear Jason Snell hunt forgotten podcast swears with a transcription engine. The panel approves.

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