Kraig Adams

Journal

A Facebook carousel slide of the Alta Via 1 route map, a reel frame of a mountain hut on a Dolomites ridge, and the Salkantay hiking guide's pages over its relief map

5 min read

12 things I worked on today

Published the hiking guides article, turned a Facebook photo post into a reel, trained a clone of my voice, and moved most of my day-to-day decisions onto a worker that runs every two hours.

I make long films about hiking alone for YouTube, and this fall I'm turning ten years of them into guides, shorts and posts everywhere, with Claude doing most of the work through KraigOS, the system we built to run it all. From today this journal is a plain list of everything I worked on, so anyone can see exactly what's going on and click into any of it.

Here's Friday, October 9.

  1. Published how my hiking guides are made. A full behind-the-scenes article on how my hiking guides get built with AI from my own films, GPS tracks and notes, and checked by a second AI before they go on sale. Claude rewrote it twice today so it's easy to skim, and I added my own section on why I'd tried and failed to make guides before. Read it: How I make my hiking guides with AI. We also shared it on X.
The cover of the hiking guides article: the Salkantay guide's pages over its relief map
The cover of the hiking guides article: the Salkantay guide's pages over its relief map
  1. A free day from every guide, sent by email. Every guide page now offers one day of that guide free, and it arrives by email a minute later from my own website, sent through Cloudflare. It's the easiest way for someone to see what a guide is like before buying it.
  1. A new kind of Facebook post for the guides. We built a format kit for photo carousels that sell one guide each: a relief map with the route first, then the practical facts (when to go, how to book, how hard it is) in small, plain text, copied from the style of @noodlesandblisters. The Alta Via 1 one went up this morning, and Torres del Paine is scheduled for tomorrow. People who saw it engaged with it, but Facebook shows photo posts to far fewer people than reels: about 600 views in its first three hours.
Three slides from the Alta Via 1 carousel: the route map, when to go, and the free day from the guide
Three slides from the Alta Via 1 carousel: the route map, when to go, and the free day from the guide
  1. So we turned it into a reel. Same facts, but over moving footage from my Alta Via 1 film, cut to music. The first version opened on the map, and honestly it made me want to swipe away; the footage was so much better than the map. The second one opens on a drone shot flying in on a hut at the tip of a ridge. It goes up on Facebook tomorrow evening.
Left: the first reel's opening, a route map. Right: the new opening, a drone shot of a hut on a ridge
Left: the first reel's opening, a route map. Right: the new opening, a drone shot of a hut on a ridge
  1. Unzipping my YouTube originals. Google Takeout is delivering the original file of almost every film I've uploaded since 2016, about 1.2 TB in zip files, and we unzip them inside Google with Colab so nothing has to pass through my laptop. Today we hit Google Drive's daily upload limit, and found that two "broken" zips were fine: Google had saved two different files under the same name. 171 of 227 films are filed in their trip folders so far. The originals are what every short and the next ambient compilation get cut from.
  1. Cloning my voice. I set up a professional voice clone with ElevenLabs (affiliate link), trained on about 31 minutes of narration I'd already recorded on my Rode microphone, so I didn't have to sit and read for an hour. The plan is two clones, one per microphone, since my Rode and my small DJI wireless mic sound different. It's training now. The whole story of how I got here gets its own article soon.
  1. Rewriting my old YouTube descriptions. Many of my older videos have empty or one-line descriptions. Claude is rewriting them in batches, and today we fixed the rule after the first batch put the same links on everything: each description is written for that video, every one links my website, and affiliate links only appear for gear that's actually in the video.
  1. Sorting everything KraigOS tracks. I'd been feeling stretched thin, so Claude sorted every open item in KraigOS: about 290 of them. Only 14 actually needed me (a decision, an approval, something only I can do). The rest is work I've already approved, which now runs on its own.
  1. A worker that runs every two hours. The scheduled Claude session that works through that list now runs every two hours, day and night, and starts each run by updating my short "needs me" list. Anything I approve during the day that doesn't need me becomes overnight work, so my time at the desk goes to decisions.
  1. A daily post on X from the cloud. The posting module is now part of KraigOS, so one post a day, always linking to something real like an article or a film, can go out on X without anyone opening a laptop. It's switched on once one last login step is done.
  1. Clearing space on my laptop. My Final Cut library is about 356 GB. Claude made a cheat sheet of every project in it: what's been published, what's backed up in Google Drive, and what could still be made from it. Finished projects are being copied to Drive so they can come off the laptop.
  1. Deciding what to make next. A sponsored film is getting its final touches and goes up Tuesday. After that, in order: a new three-hour ambient hiking compilation, a 2026 version of my favorite gear video, and a narrated cut of my Kyrgyzstan horse trek film. The bigger story video about Norway comes after, and every new video gets its article here first, as its outline.

What's next. - The Alta Via 1 reel and the Torres del Paine carousel go up tomorrow. - The last original films get unzipped over the weekend. - A first listen to the voice clone. - The sponsored film goes live on Tuesday. </content> </invoke>