Ai and problems you might run into?
Chris and George B. Thomas troubleshoot AI chat crashes and discuss why context continuity matters. They cover hardware choices like NPUs and GPUs, backup strategies using markdown files, and George's workflow syncing AI sessions with an Obsidian vault for quick project retrieval.
Chapters
Good morning, LinkedIn friends. Value First Nation, welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Monday, uh, March 23rd, 2026, here with George B. Thomas. How you doing, man?
I'm doing good, brother, but you just failed because I wore a black hat with a gray hoodie. You didn't say anything before we hopped on. but I got the right hat on. I'm back from vacation, ready to rock and roll, ready to talk about AI. How the heck are you doing, brother?
I'm doing good, doing good. You know, continuing to learn and grow with this thing called AI. Had some— had a new layer of troubleshooting to experience this past weekend. Uh, but before we dive in, just a quick shout out, and Nico's not going to be joining us today, so, um, well, we'll shout out hubhelperharry.com, his latest and greatest, taking his custom GPT out into the real world, uh, given it's its own standalone app. Um, really cool things he's doing over there, and appreciate the sponsorship of the show. Um, yeah, this weekend. Uh, so you know how, especially with OpenClaw, uh, it's come out, everybody buys like about Mac Minis, and like there was just so much more exposure than I was used to, to the difference between running AI on a Mac and a Windows machine related to shared memory. Right. And just the memory setup of a Mac for various reasons, better when you just need so much memory related to the GPUs and all of the PUs. I saw a new one as I was updating today, NPUs. Not sure what that means, but that was the Intel update I had to do today. Maybe that's like nanobot processing unit or something. But so I use AntiGravity, right? And I like to use it as opposed to the Cloud Desktop app because I can do lots of sessions, right? I can do multiple sessions, right? So if you're in a terminal, maybe it's multiple tabs. And launch the collective on Friday, have our first meetup, get a lot of feedback, have big plans over the weekend to just start to build out more infrastructure. So got all these sessions rolling. Wake up on Sunday, and all of the sessions had ended. And ended meaning, you know, uh, crashed down, went down to the lowest, um, you know, Claude Code was not active anymore. He was not waiting for me. The session had ended, right? And if you've been working, I mean, with any kind of chat, uh, with AI, the importance of continuity of the conversation and making sure you don't lose context. Very important. So at this moment, and I hadn't experienced anything really remotely similar to this. Yeah, right. So let's say that happened on your side. What would your first steps be?
Yeah. By the way, let's back up a second. NPU is a neural processing unit, a specialized microprocessor designed specifically to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning tasks such as neural network calculations, matrix multiplication, and image processing. So now, Chris, you know what NPU stands for when it comes to CPUs and all the PUs of things that we, uh, have to pay attention to. Chris, this has actually happened to me, uh, before. And what I did in my situation doesn't sound like it was as grandiose as yours, but I had two different conversations going. I use terminal. I don't use anti-gravity, lovable, any— I'm just straight up terminal dude at this point. Had two terminals going, and I guess maybe they were battling each other. Maybe my machine ran out of resources because I was also doing a ton of other things. But they crashed. And so knowing the importance of context, I basically started over, asked it what was there from a created code base locally so far, gave it the instructions I had previously given it to try to get it to pick up from where it was. But it was a little bit of a battle in it understanding that it had started a thing and there was some there. But here's where we were trying to end to. But eventually got it back on the road. And this is also too one of the precipices of why I ended up building Echo, because I was like, hey, I need a machine I can work on and a machine that will be doing work on it. And so now here where I stand, the video, Google Chrome, Slack, Zoom, like all the things that take up resources here, Echo beside me, AI working, me not bugging it. Like, you see, so that was like one of the things where I'm like, okay, this has to change. It can't be one machine to rule everything. I need multiple machines.
Yeah, and it was like the timing was impeccable because I actually, one of the sessions was local IT agent. Right, like trying to manage systems, because one of the things I want to do is like make it so I can, you know, pick up my laptop elsewhere, and I'm not stuck at my desk to be able to, you know, work. And like creating a shared network and like all of this stuff is out of, out of my usual domain of expertise, right? And, um, what I ended up having to So like my first step is like, okay, Claude, screenshot, this is what's happening, right? But the difference now is that since it's crashing, I can't have an ongoing conversation with Claude in the way that I have been, right? Because I just have to screenshot a lot, right? Like, and so that's when I went over to the terminal started up a conversation. I said, hey, looks like you're gonna have to guide me through doing terminal commands outside of an AI chat so that it doesn't get interrupted every time. And that's where, luckily, through this journey, you know, if this had been last year, like, I hadn't had as much exposure to the terminal, to the command line, so that would have been much more uncomfortable for me. But a lot of times when you are working with Claude, uh, or, or any AI in this, in this, in this manner, the options that you get are often, well, you could run it yourself or I could do it for you, right? And obviously, usually I'm saying, well, you can just do it for me. But just that exposure of the options, right, creates a whole new space for me, like, okay, Maybe it is better at this moment to do this thing and not use all the tokens if I can just do it myself in this terminal. All those little moments of being able to use this path, it's like if I'm going to play with fire related to how my base system is set up and partitioned and D drives and C drives, Like, I have to know that this is a— there's risk related to what happened over the weekend. Yeah. Right. And then be comfortable either, you know, at some point having to call somebody else in or just, you know, starting to troubleshoot, just being comfortable with uncomfort and discomfort in that moment. Um, I think after this morning, You know, you get those instructions and especially Windows, I don't know if it's like this for Apple, but you know, it's like, why the hell haven't those updates happened already? You know, one of those moments, like, why did I have to go to the website to update this thing that is built into the system? Like, right, that's what ended up happening. That's how I see NPUs is a thing. But now that you, you know, I mean, it makes sense.
Like, tell you what it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a couple things too I'll add in here. Like, what happened to me and what happened to you, I had also affected like part of my workflow and things that I have in place. So for instance, one of the things that I do now is like, I'm, I've always been big on plan mode. But now what I do is I always say, hey, before we get started, save this plan mode to a.md file so I can get back to it. Okay. Now people might think like, how do I get back to it? The other thing that I think a lot of people struggle with that I would tell you there's a better way. And you said kind of like playing with fire and partitioning hard drives and this, that, and the other thing, like you've got to get organized. And by the way, organization of like, hey, yeah, I've got this folder on my desktop and like this is where all the things are happening. That's not organization. Let me explain. When I tell Echo, hey, I want you to save this project plan as a.md file so if anything happens, we can get back to it. I also have downloaded on both machines Obsidian because Echo is also an Obsidian vault, which means when I tell it to save a.md file project plan, it's saving it to a structure that is project plans so that I can go back to it. Also, because I'm using Obsidian, I don't have to scroll through a bunch of things and look through like the actual folder structure. I can use the search feature of Obsidian. So as an example, let's say I'm looking for the outline that we did 2 weeks ago on custom record customization for HubSpot for the Hub Heroes podcast. Now, because that is saved in Obsidian, I can just search record customization, pull up the.md file, and then go to work with like, hey, now we're going to do episode 2. Look at what we had built here. Look at the transcript of what we talked about. Like, what's the relevant episode to that we should roll into. But that's because of structure and process and flow, meaning there are more times you should be asking your AI to save things than you currently probably do. And there are better ways that you can view the things that it's creating than you probably currently do.
Right.
So one of the other things that I do, Chris, is I'm doing an AI course for solopreneurs. It's a 12-week course. For a company that I help called Lifestar. They like help the solopreneur community and I have the like raw.md files, but I also have it output Word docs or PDFs of like the speaker notes. Well, why would I have duplicates and why would I do something like that? One is for me to use with my AI assistant and for me, and the other is to then be able to open up in like Natural Reader and be able to listen to or share with somebody else what we're going to be talking about. Or so, right? So you got to think like 2 steps ahead and 2 things that you want to need to save that you haven't been saving or thinking of as you kind of move forward. The other thing too that I'll say is I didn't— not that you did and not that anybody did, and I fully understand that everybody has budgets, but I did not cheap out on either of the computers. Or systems or processors or CPUs or graphics cards on any of the things that we're talking about. And also, I am— my probably like biggest OCD tech thing is I'm forever and always going to make sure that automatic Windows updates is happening. I'm always and forever making sure that my machine has the latest and greatest of what it needs to have. To do the work that— so I don't get stuck in these like, uh, please hold, we're updating. And I'm like, please hold, I'm creating. Like, what are you doing? Like, so I'm, I'm a fanatic when it comes to those kind of things as well.
Yeah, yeah. And I, uh, I'm with you there. And this was a part of like how like we're not at the, at the the frictionless place yet with all of this infrastructure. Because, you know, we, we did all those things as we got started, and I got a new system, invested in a new system to avoid this very thing happening, right?
Yeah.
But, but I think something interesting that you're bringing up is depending on— you know, I talk about this when it's lovable or the app-specific builders, right? When you come at it with a plan, it delivers that plan, but it's not built to go do a completely different thing that you just decided on in that moment because all the infrastructure is built. And if you try to ask it to move, it will start to move a little bit by a little bit, right? And when I was starting up this system, I did a lot of work to to like build a plan with Gemini and Claude and like, all right, it's going to be partitioned like this. We got to make a D drive because we got 32 megs of memory over here. We'll have 64 over here. That means we'll be able to stream and we'll be able to do agents and nothing's going to screw up. And then we're going to have local models and right. We built that.
The best laid plans of mice and men, my friend.
Right. And it wasn't fun for the first couple weeks, right? So I was like, okay, let's just step back. Let me work with quad code. Maybe we'll get to the local models eventually. Yeah. But as soon as I started doing that, it's like, okay, that's not the system that was set up. And so knowing that, I'm not surprised that something like this could happen, right? But the way that it did was for when it says to you, like, oh, you don't have enough memory and you've got 96. Like, what? No, I just paid some money for the system to avoid this specific thing. What did I do as a human? Yep. Or what have I not done?
Yep.
To, like, there could be, like, just the memories just building up over here, like memory leaks related to Chrome, like all that stuff we might have experienced because it was similar to just you know, the, like a Chrome tab to say, all right, I'm out of memory, we'll see you later. Right. But at this level, when it was like stopping me from having a conversation with AI to get the help that I needed was this kind of new level of, you know, troubleshooting. And I'm going to just share my screen because you can see.
Can I ask you a question while you're sharing your screen?
Sure.
As a human, how often do you shut down your computer or reboot your computer? Are you like most where you just let it run and you let the monitor to go to sleep and you tap the keyboard and it comes back on?
Um, usually not. But again, in this scenario, had it been on for a good long while? Just a couple days.
So like, what happens to you if you've just been on for a couple days straight? As a human, do you work efficiently if you haven't like rested and went to bed? Now I know we're talking about computers, But this is another thing that I'm just going to share that I'm a fanatic about is like the occasional shut it down or the occasional just general reboot in the middle of a day or like at the end of the day for sure. So like at night it can just like, okay, be off. And when I start you up, like we're starting fresh. Like that's something that I would tell people, especially when you're doing things like this, like long hours of active AI work. You should plan in a thing that sounds something like this. Echo, I need you to save all memory, context, and second brain items you need from this conversation. Oh, they're saved? Okay, thank you. Exit, reboot, start up a new session. Okay, I'll go ahead, Chris.
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you there. And that's how I usually like to end. I'll say this moment of just being mid-session, right? Definitely over the past few weeks, I've let it go more often. And that's where being able to do that and not, you know, not receiving any consequences, right? Like, you know, you just keep going with it, keep pushing. Yeah. And so that ends up playing a stretcher, right?
As a human.
Right.
Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. And so your, your, your system ended up in a stretcher over the weekend, by the way. That's what happened. I'm just—
well, you could see, you could think of it like that, but that's where there's also the Windows Update side of things.
Yeah.
Where these systems just update and then stuff happens because it wasn't the way, right? Yeah. And that's where, like, I mean, when I first see that, I'm hoping that just a restart you know, solves the problem. And then when it doesn't, you're like, oh, damn it.
Oh, oops.
Like, yeah, right.
Because there went my weekend.
Like, my, my history here where at some point, like, this please help right here and screenshot, it's me just trying to get the message in real quick.
Yeah.
Before the session ends. And then we do some stuff, right? I'm like, okay, ready to go. Let's, let's do these sessions that I have planned with each business unit leader. Yeah, right. And then, um, you know, and then that's where I had to take it over to, you know, the terminal because we got through this and then again crashing again. But now this is the part I remember why I brought this up now. The, uh, Anthropic starting to make it easier. Yeah. You pick up where you left off.
Yeah.
Across sessions. And something that happened last week, and this is where, because they're updating and Windows is updating now, there's NPUs is a thing. Like everybody's updating, right? It's kind of like I am happy to embrace this, right? As a human who wants to leverage cutting-edge technology.
Yep.
Right? So it's not be like, oh God, let me change my old workflow. I can't depend on Cloud Code this much, blah, blah, blah. Right? It's like, no, let's, let's figure this out. Everybody's moving fast. And one of the things they came out with was the ability to, you know, keep track of like naming your sessions, like the session name, right? Which I saw— again, this is what's interesting— like, on one of these, I saw this new thing come up. It didn't happen for all the sessions. I don't know why. Yeah, but when it— what it did was like made it very clear which session in the command line that I was on.
Yep.
Right. And, um, again, but, but with all that stuff happening, and that's I think that's the fun part here is like Claude, the LLMs, AI, they're learning through the same way that I'm learning in terms of like, oh, that's okay. This is a new piece missing with these crashes. Like it's all the screenshots it's getting, like all of my issues and the way that I am trying to troubleshoot it as a human on the other side. Like all of this stuff is just building And it's never going to be worse than it is right now. Like, how many times have we said that over the last year?
Oh, a billion.
Where it's just like, yeah, this could— I mean, this is the kind of thing like I lost, like, a couple of days. Yeah.
This is—
we see other people where it's just like, okay, not ready yet. Not ready for me to dive into, not ready for me to invest. Oh no, you know, it's just not the right way, or not— I mean, I don't want to speak for everybody's moment. There's obviously business-critical stuff, yeah, that you cannot go down for a couple days on. Yeah, but, but this is also why you need to find a way to like have a separate experiment, a separate thing going on at your business to to figure this out, right? You don't just get to wait until it's, it's primed and polished and you can one button click install it.
No.
Right.
No.
So that was—
I had a completely different weekend, by the way.
Yeah, I bet you did. Coming back from vacation.
Yeah, I came back from vacation and, you know, I purposely did not do any work on Friday. I kept myself on vacation for Friday. But Saturday, man, the amount of work for clients that I was able to get done in the rate in which I was able to get it done, and then the 4 to maybe 6 hours that I was able to work on spiritualsideofleadership.com, and the just holy crap, knock it out the park stuff it was doing. Um, mind-blowing, mind-blowing. And the reason I'm bringing this up on the tail end of what you're talking about here today, Chris, is when you get past the hurdles, when you're willing to step in when it's messy and go through the messy middle, there is a place that you can reach that is the mecca of working in unison, in unity with your AI assistant. It can get so smart if you set up the right processes and the right memory structures and the— and you can literally see what you need to see, know what you need to know to tell it what it needs to see and know. And it's ridiculous, dude. We completely from the ground up, like, rebuilt adjusted, added features, functionality, user experience to 3 of the tools. And when we were done with doing that with 3 of the tools on the site, we then turned the pages that talk about the tools into pillar pages based on the updates that we had just created, uh, features, functionalities, user experience, but as educational pillar pages of like Why a decision canvas is important for leaders. Why daily check-ins is important for leaders. Why the Superhuman Leadership Cockpit makes sense, especially after you take the assessment. And so, like, I stepped back at— don't judge me, by the way, there was some watching some TV along the way— but I stepped back at 10 PM at night and went, holy crap. We did all of this. Like, it's ridiculous where you can get.
And like, and this is in the face of— and this is why Thy First exists. This is why Thy First Collective exists, to create the space for others to experience what George just mentioned, because we still see out there, like, oh, I need a vacation after the vacation, and I feel so behind, and I'm dreading the day that I have to come back after because it's gonna be a bunch of emails and I gotta do a lot of work. Yeah, like, well, I imagine George has always found a way to be excited for it for that day back.
Uh, no, like, not always. Let's be honest, there are days, there are vacations I get back from and be like But, but I will say there is a golden rule of do the work in a way that it's not about you, but it's about like serving higher and humans. So it is easier for me to get back into the mix of things knowing the part I play in it, if that makes sense.
Right. Well, and now it's even easier because, yeah, you have so much fun. Oh, you're coming back, bro. Yes. Like, oh my gosh, that day, that would have been just like torture. Torture.
It wasn't— dude, on the day back, and again, this is just kind of one of those fun things, I put out a LinkedIn post. You can go look for it if you want. It's totally up to you, the viewer. I put out a LinkedIn post out of excitement of a thing that I built on a Saturday after coming back from vacation. And people had all sorts of questions about how I actually did the thing and like the thing. But one of the like hee hee ha ha moments was seeing Dharmesh engage with the post, meaning he liked the post, the conversation that I was having around MCP CLI API, a.k.a. HubSpot, a.k.a. programmable email modules, like on a Saturday, sipping a coffee, being nerdy, going, man, this is a great life we live in.
It is. And we'll keep sharing, sharing that life as we move through the week. Hopefully this story of troubleshooting and, you know, return from vacation was helpful, resonates a little bit. Know you're not alone, and we're gonna keep showing up to make sure you know that and help you, help you stay on the right track. So welcome back, George. And we'll see everybody tomorrow. Yep, yep.
