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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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Latest20 May 2026· 5 min read

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-fitmlaistartup-capitalventure-capital

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

4 May 2026· 5 min

Hacking the real bottleneck

Everyone's talking about humans being the AI bottleneck. The conversation is all about skills, tooling, and workflow. Nobody's talking about the brain's fuel source, and why Monday was cooked while Tuesday was sharp.

ai-productivitybiohackingcognitive-performance

3 May 2026· 7 min

The electrical revolution didn't happen overnight

Factories took a hundred years to evolve from bolting an electric motor onto the old lineshaft through to flexible CNC machining. The same transformation is happening in knowledge work right now, compressed into months instead of decades. A mechanical engineer's firsthand memory of Holden's engine plant at Fishermans Bend, and why the businesses that will win are the ones willing to clear the floor.

ai-adoptionmanufacturing-historycnc-machining

30 April 2026· 3 min

The AI alignment problem has been delivered by a monkey

Opus 4.7 spent a fortnight ignoring explicit branch constraints, creating chaos in the codebase, and cheerfully disobeying every rule written to stop it. The AI alignment problem arrived, but it looked nothing like what Bostrom predicted.

ai-alignmentmisalignmentopus-4-7

30 April 2026· 5 min

You are my world, until I'm not

I wired my agents through Claude's Gmail and Calendar connectors one integration at a time until the whole operation was resting on it. Then the connectors started breaking. The management surface offered no diagnostics; the only fix was to disconnect and reconnect, like rebooting a Windows machine. This morning I went to do the reboot and discovered the platform itself was down. The connectors had become disconnectors. And when they do, the client blames the builder, not the provider.

ai-agentsplatform-dependencyconnectors

24 April 2026· 4 min

An adventure in data first consulting

Earlier this month I spent a day in an Australian video security operator's boardroom with five years of their production data prepared. By the end of it we'd found 91 devices their dashboard had never shown them, a market position invisible outside the building, and a 99 percent improvement nobody had quantified. None of it required new systems. It was already in the data.

data-firstconsultingcase-study

15 April 2026· 5 min

The freeway to the mystery house

The M1 Monash has been under construction for thirty years because cheaper trips make more trips. Software is currently doing exactly the same thing. The SaaS apocalypse is Jevons paradox playing out in real time, and what comes next is a thousand mystery houses that need specialists to keep them standing.

saas-apocalypsejevons-paradoxagentic-development

6 April 2026· 3 min

Are we approaching terminal velocity?

Four months of agentic AI acceleration and the inference ceiling arrived fast. Anthropic is buckling under demand, subscription limits are tightening, and the physical constraints of chips, energy, and data centre buildout aren't going away next quarter. The all-you-can-eat buffet is over.

ai-agentsinference-capacitycloud-vs-local