I came across a tool that puts a little widget on your website so a visitor can start a live video call with you while they are still on the page. Good idea. Then I saw the price: 197 dollars a month. And the builder part of my brain said what it always says. I could build that.
That thought has cost me more time than any tool has ever cost me money. So instead of guessing, I made the AI answer it.
I use the Obsidian Web Clipper, a free browser extension that saves a whole web page into your notes as plain text. One click on the pricing page. One click on the how it works page. Now the AI can read exactly what the product does and what it costs, and I never have to type a summary of it.
This is the part people skip, and it is why their answers come back vague. If you paste half a description into a chat window, you get an answer about that half. If you hand over the actual page, you get an answer about the actual product.
Before saving, I add one line to the clip. Mine said: is this worth building myself, or should I just pay the base 197 a month price? Nothing fancy. Plain words.
Now the question travels with the page. When the AI reads the clip later, the question is already sitting there. No second trip, no re-explaining, no reconstructing what I was even asking about. That is a small habit that saves you a conversation every single time.
Why the note matters: without it, you have to explain the whole website again the next time you open that file. With it, you type one word and the AI already knows what you wanted to know.
I say ingest, and the AI reads what I clipped, files it into the vault, and connects it to everything already in there. Not a folder it gets dumped into and forgotten. Connected, so the new page sits next to the projects, notes, and decisions it relates to.
Then it answers. And because it holds my goals and my plans, it is not answering should someone build this. It is answering should I build this, given what I am actually trying to do.
Worth adding: I ran the same job in two different tools at once, just to show it works either way. If one is down or slow, you are not stuck. That is a real thing that will happen to you, and having a second option ready is the difference between losing an afternoon and losing a minute.
Pay for it, but treat it as a seven day test rather than a subscription you forget about. The reasoning was the useful part. Five of the six features I could genuinely build. The sixth, putting a name to anonymous visitors, is not code at all. It is rented data, and buying that data alone costs about what the whole tool costs.
So building it would have bought me five features I could live without and left me still paying for the one that mattered. That is the kind of thing you find out three weeks into a build, not before it, unless you ask first.
It also flagged that the tool only names a small share of visitors and does not publish its numbers, so the honest move is to run the free trial and measure it against my own traffic rather than trust the pitch.
Capture what you find, while you are still looking at it. Save it into the brain with your question attached. Then ask it what to do. That is the whole loop, and it works for a tool you are considering, a competitor you are watching, or an article you want to act on instead of bookmark.
Every week something new shows up that you could build. Your time is the thing you are actually spending, and it is the one thing you cannot buy back. A second brain that knows your goals turns build or buy from a gut feeling into a five minute answer with reasons attached. If the idea is new to you, start with why AI needs a second brain to be useful.
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