Issue 37: May The Force Be With US

Tech Force, Wrappers, Buddha, Docling, Git

Author

Mike Murphy
December 19, 2025

🗞️ AI News of The Week: US Tech Force Launches



Mike’s immediate thoughts:
I'm loving that the US government is going all-in on AI and proactively positioning the country as a leader in the space. Look, I don't have much faith in the government running things (and I don't think that's the plan), but at least we're stepping into the arena instead of sitting on the sidelines until it’s too late.

Side Note: Joe Gebbia (founder of AirBnb)


What is US Tech Force?

The US Tech Force is recruiting an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology. Backed by the White House, Tech Force will tackle the most complex and large-scale civic and defense challenges of our era – from administering critical financial infrastructure at the Treasury Department to advancing cutting-edge programs at the Department of Defense – and everything in between. (Source, US Tech Force Website)

Upon completing the program (2 years), engineers can seek employment with the partnering private-sector companies for potential full-time roles – demonstrating the value of combining civil service with technical expertise.


🧠 AI Term of The Week: AI Wrapper

If you have been around the AI space and tools, you may have heard the term ‘AI Wrapper’ or heard people dismiss an AI tool as "just an AI wrapper", but what does that actually mean?

AI Wrappers:

  • A product built on top of someone else's AI model (GPT-4, Claude, etc.)

  • Adds a user interface, specific workflows, or specialized features

  • ChatGPT itself is technically a wrapper around base GPT models

  • Good wrappers: Solve real problems, make AI accessible without technical skills.

  • Bad wrappers: Just add a pretty interface to something that already exists and charges you monthly.

💬 Quote of the Week:

❝


“What we think, we become."

– Buddha

🧰 AI Tool of The Week: Docling

Docling has been on my radar as learning RAG has been a focus of mine.

A major challenge of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is that it can be a real pain getting some documents into usable formats. Docling makes this a breeze/ 

Docling turns messy PDFs, DOCX, and slides into clean, structured data—ready for RAG, GenAI apps, or anything downstream. Complex layouts? Tables? Formulas? It handles them, so you don’t have to.

What Docling does:

  • Open-source document converter for RAG workflows

  • Handles PDFs, Word docs, and other formats

  • Converts files into clean, structured data AI can actually use

  • Preserves formatting, tables, and document structure

🛠 What I Made: Git & GitHub for Beginners: Turn Any Project Into a Repo Using VS Code

Description:
How to turn your local n8n-workflows folder into a GitHub repository and sync future changes—all using VS Code's visual interface (no terminal commands needed).

🤖 What You'll Learn

  • What is Git?

  • What is GitHub?

  • What is VS Code?

  • What is .gitignore file?

  • How To Turn Local Project Folders into GitHub Repositories

  • How To Sync Local & GitHub Folders & Files


Mike Murphy — The AI Handyman 🧰
Helping creators & small businesses turn their content & documents into AI‑powered tools.