Building a Self-Directed PhD With Claude AI

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In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with software engineer and self-described "Renegade Historian" Dave Stanton, who has built an entire AI-driven workflow that lets him program — and write a 400-page history book — almost entirely by voice from his phone.

They get into the nuts and bolts: an always-on Mac Mini running stacked Claude Code sessions in tmux, SSH access from anywhere, voice-to-text tools, and a self-designed "PhD" where Sonnet plays research assistant and Opus plays a hypercritical dissertation chair, with every critique tracked as a GitHub issue. Dave explains why the book itself was never really the goal.

The conversation widens into the bigger questions — what gets lost when AI handles the rote work, whether to retain human connection on purpose, and Dave's honest 80/20 split between optimism and unease about where all of this is heading.

• Matt Stauffer on X (x.com/mattstauffer)
• Dave Stanton’s Website (davestanton.com/book)
• Dave on X (x.com/gotoplanb)
• Tighten Website (tighten.com)
• Blink for iOS (blink.sh)
• Superwhisper (superwhisper.com)
• Geography as Destiny on GitHub (github.com/gotoplanb/geography-as-destiny)
• ngrok.com
• Tailscale (tailscale.com)
• github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
• Solo (soloterm.com)
• Please Use AI by Sean Smucker (shawnsmucker.substack.com/p/please-use-ai)

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten (tighten.com).

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