Both my wife and I have our favorite toys and leisure activities: mine are gadgets, books, internet and recently AI. And one of hers was always the garden. We also have many shared leisure activities like hiking and traveling, but that’s not the point; the point is how these two worlds, the world of AI and the world of gardening, suddenly connected.

She has been using AI, mainly Google Gemini, for some time, and was quite impressed with its results. I couldn’t really convince her that Claude (especially Opus and Fable) is in a different league. Technically, it wasn’t a fair comparison, because she was using the free models from Gemini and I was using the top models from Claude, but nevertheless.

So yesterday I installed the Claude Desktop application on her MacBook, and connected it to our Max-20 subscription. Afterwards I created two co-working projects: one of them for her new garden, and fed it the history of her previous Gemini conversations on the garden topic, plus a photo of a hand-drawn plan of the garden with the locations of existing and planned plants, some distances and some scribbled notes.

We were both amazed to see what Fable managed to do with it. It created a great-looking plan of the garden. It created a list of plants with recommendations, a separate markdown note for each, outlining which one needs to go to a more shady part and which to a more sunny one, and which has which water requirements (this was his own initiative, we just approved doing it). It drafted an irrigation system design so that the garden can survive our travels in summer. It made several more suggestions, which hadn’t even occurred to us. Well, there is no surprise they didn’t occur to me, as my capability for suggestions when it comes to the area of gardening is extremely limited; but my wife said that she actually saw several good suggestions from her point of view as an experienced gardener.

Well done, Fable, well done!