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Notes from the workshop

What I'm learning, building, and breaking. The thinking behind the systems I ship.

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Latest5 August 2026· 4 min read

Clag is not the glue to hold your business together

Every business has five systems, three spreadsheets reconciling them, and one person doing copy and paste every morning because nobody else knows which fields go where. The industry named a role for half of this problem. The other half was never written down.

forward-deployed-engineeringai-implementationsystems-integrationdeep-takedata-silos

31 July 2026· 4 min

The Singular Taste

A bookkeeper sat across from me, convinced AI could never do what she does. She was testing the puddle and judging the ocean. This is about what happens to the 5% of work that matters when the other 95% disappears.

ai-singularitywhite-collar-aihuman-judgment

3 July 2026· 6 min

Writing software post solstice. 2026.

Seven months of building software with AI agents, from seven SOPs and a yes key to a managed build queue that runs overnight. An interview conducted on a bike ride, by one of the agents in the system.

loop-engineeringai-agentsmanaged-build-queue

25 June 2026· 5 min

The Tribute

Ray Dalio came back from China talking about tribute type relationships with Beijing. Two weeks earlier the US government pulled the most capable AI models on earth under export controls. The sovereign AI conversation that followed revealed an uncomfortable truth: the only frontier AI that ships without a foreign government's export licence is Chinese. The pattern connecting all of this has been running for two thousand years.

geopoliticssovereign-aiexport-controls

10 June 2026· 4 min

Behind the scene where AI saved the AI Engineer conference

John Allsopp's conference streaming pipeline broke during a live, oversubscribed event at AI Engineer Melbourne. Claude Code rebuilt it in under two hours, engineering around YouTube's bot detection while John was on stage MCing. A twenty year web veteran's honest reaction to a capability shift measured in months, not years.

claude-codeai-engineer-melbournesystem-engineering

4 June 2026· 2 min

AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing

Two days volunteering at AI Engineer Melbourne. The energy, the conversations, the humbling realisation of how much there is still to learn, and the privilege of being amongst people with real investment in where AI is going.

ai-adoptionorganisational-changeworkforce-planning

2 June 2026· 3 min

The recorder that wrote its own blog post

John Allsopp pulled a recorder out of his pocket at the AI engineer conference in Melbourne. One week of interleaved building later, it delivers meeting summaries as open markdown. The device recorded the ideation session for its own blog post.

hardwareai-agentsfirmware

20 May 2026· 5 min

Mechanics and Realities of Raising Capital

Five founders talked about money with specifics at Stone & Chalk. Product market fit is the gate. Everything else in a raise is downstream of whether the business works.

fundraisingbootstrappingproduct-market-fit

18 May 2026· 6 min

The shakedown

$1,500 in tokens on a Tuesday, and a $10 subscription covering the tab. Anthropic is repricing inference, Uber blew its annual AI budget by March, and GitHub killed flat fee Copilot pricing because agentic workloads broke the model. The cost of inference is the elephant in the room, and the shakedown is coming for every business model pretending it doesn't exist.

inference-economicsai-agentsanthropic

12 May 2026· 5 min

Finding the knack amongst all the tools

A broken car in Metung, a garage full of tools, and no idea where to start. That is what an AI agent session looks like from the inside. The tools exist; the knack for using them does not come installed.

ai-agentsmcpcontext-engineering

6 May 2026· 4 min

Beware there be dragons when sending your AI into the jungle

Two production databases deleted by AI agents in two weeks. The incidents tell different stories, but they point to the same gap: if nobody in the room knows where the dragons are, the AI will walk straight into the cave.

ai-agentsai-safetydevops