I stopped posting here after January and never said why. This is the catch-up, and the start of writing here again.
The honest version
The world doesn’t feel like a happy place right now. Personally, though, I’m optimistic. I feel good about my career and where it’s going, and I’m finding it fun to use AI tools and learn alongside them.
What changed for me
I used to think of AI as something I chatted with. This year I started treating Claude Code as part of my workflow: it lives in my folders, reads my notes and my code, and does the work with me. That only works because everything is local files. My Obsidian second brain was where it clicked. I tried a second brain in Notion before, and this is nothing like it. I was excited about NotebookLM for a while too, but I don’t use it now. Once my notes were local files that Claude Code could work on directly, I didn’t need a separate tool to ask questions of them. I can prompt to manage the content of my own notes, and that has been a game changer.
A few things came out of it:
- I have more ideas, more often, and I connect them in ways I didn’t before.
- My head doesn’t have to be where information is stored. It helps me structure what’s going on up there, so I can see it.
- The same setup works for code. It’s how I built this site.
It has helped at work too. AI has made huge progress this year, with something new almost every week. It has been hectic, but overall it’s been good. The tools I can’t get over, and wish more people used, are Claude Design and the browser extension. The whole interface has improved a lot, and the models have too.
I first saw the shape of it in a slide at a Claude Code meetup: chat, then agentic IDEs, then agentic CLIs like Claude Code. Since then it has kept going with background agents and managed agents, and then past code altogether with Claude Design and the browser extension.
Brisbane
At the end of July I went up to Brisbane to see my colleagues for an offsite. I drove up in my van and did a bit of surfing on the way. Then I spent a few days with the team talking about AI, the future and our clients. The client my team looks after seems happy with what we’re making, which is a good way to end an offsite.
Why I rebuilt this site
Over Christmas 2025 I built a friend’s website, and I did most of it by hand. It didn’t take long, but I noticed that a lot of the work went into repetitive, boring steps. Those are exactly the things that can be a skill now.
So when I came back to my own site, I rebuilt it as a WordPress block theme and set it up so the boring parts run themselves. Writing a post now starts in my notes, and getting it onto the site is one prompt. That leaves more time for the fun part, which is thinking.
The part that’s harder than it looks
AI helps me go faster, but it also costs me something. Before it can do the work, I have to think through the whole thing up front: how it fits together, what the steps are, what “done” means. That bird’s-eye thinking is hard, and it takes time and effort of its own.
I’m still working out how to do that well. It is probably the most useful thing I’ve learnt this year, so I expect to write about it here.
What’s next
I’ll post when I have something to say, probably around once a month. Mostly it will be life and code, and I’m not going to plan the mix. If you’re on a similar path, or building with AI yourself, I’d like to hear how it’s going for you.
