Blog

Notes from the workshop

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

All posts ai-agents9 ai-native-dev9 otagelabs8 agent-orchestration5 claude-code4 bootstrapping4 software-craft4 developer-experience3 multi-agent3

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

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