The Bounded AI Agent

> Wiring the agent into a $5 notes app I cannot stop using, why Opus 4.7 sent me back to ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month, the local-LLM experiment that nearly fried my Mac Mini while I was in the mountains, and what an AI agent actually does to an ADHD brain.

Episode 5 of Digital Thoughts is a status report on what living with an always-on AI agent actually feels like once the novelty wears off and the bills show up. The thread holding it together is *Capacity, Not Capability* — the constraint that matters isn't how smart the model is, it's how much of my day it can actually hold.

Here's what's inside:

- **The $5 notes app that became the agent's front door.** I'd been bouncing between Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes for years. The thing that finally stuck wasn't the prettiest or the most powerful — it was the one the agent could read and write to without friction. I get into why that single property reorganized my whole capture loop.

- **Why Opus 4.7 sent me crawling back to ChatGPT Pro.** I wanted to love it. The reasoning is genuinely better. But $200/month buys a kind of throughput that changes how you use the thing, and I underestimated how much that mattered until I tried to live on metered Opus for a week.

- **The local-LLM experiment that nearly cooked my Mac Mini.** I was in the mountains, the agent was running unattended, and the thermals on a headless M-series box doing sustained inference are... not what the marketing suggests. What I learned about where local actually pays off, and where it absolutely does not.

- **What an agent does to an ADHD brain.** This is the part I didn't expect to write. The agent isn't a productivity multiplier for me — it's a working-memory prosthetic. That distinction changes which features I care about and which ones I now ignore.

The part that surprised me most — the ADHD section — is in the full post.

Full post: https://thoughts.jock.pl/p/the-bounded-ai-agent-ep5

Free weekly: https://thoughts.jock.pl