Writing

The Friction Was the Thinking I’m writing this in bed, on my laptop, at an hour I will not admit to. I could tell you I’m doing it because the idea wouldn’t wait. The honest version is that I’ve started to enjoy the shipping more than the sleeping — and I’ve watched enough other people do the same that I no longer think it’s just me. A few weeks ago a colleague told me, half-proud and half-haunted, that she’d been working three nights running well past midnight, and the AI tool she was using had started telling her, unprompted, that she should go to bed. ...

Most things are better. A few are worse. And which is true depends on who you are. A piece that started with a dinner-party conversation that didn’t sit right.

It started with a negative number. Last winter, I was checking the Octopus Agile app and saw an electricity price of -3p/kWh. The grid was paying me to use electricity. Wind generation had outstripped demand overnight and the wholesale price had gone negative. It lasted a couple of hours. But it planted a question: if electricity sometimes costs less than nothing, and sometimes costs 50-60p, what would happen if I could buy it when it was cheap and use it when it was expensive? ...

VisiCalc was not built by IBM. It was built by Dan Bricklin because he needed a better way to do his Harvard MBA homework. He was sitting in a lecture, watching a professor erase and recalculate an entire spreadsheet on a blackboard, and thought: my computer could do this. So he built the thing himself. That piece of software became the reason businesses bought personal computers in the first place – not because IT departments decided to deploy spreadsheets, but because one person built a tool that matched how he needed to think. ...

Our electricity bill is around two and a half thousand pounds a year. By the end of this year, I expect it to be closer to thirteen hundred. That is not a sales pitch. It is arithmetic. A home battery, a tariff switch, and some automation I already have running. The numbers are specific to my household – I will walk through them – but the framework applies to anyone willing to do the maths for their own situation. And the maths, right now, are better than they have ever been. ...

Your AI Team Will Drown You (If You Let It) It took five days. Five days from the moment I gave my AI team its first task to the moment I realised I could not hold it all in my head. Not because the work was bad – it was good. Infrastructure monitoring deployed, photo management running, blog live, site redesigned, backup systems rebuilt, six dashboards configured, three research pieces completed, network audit done, network reconfiguration planned. Seventeen distinct deliverables in five days, each one competent, each one something I had asked for. ...

My wife read my last article – the one about building AI teams and not relying on off-the-shelf tools – and her response was immediate and completely fair: “That’s great. But how do I actually start?” She is smart, busy, and has precisely zero interest in how AI works under the hood. She does not want to learn about models or prompts or agent architectures. She wants to know whether this thing can help her draft emails that do not take thirty minutes, stay on top of the logistics that pile up every week, and stop forgetting that the school needs a reply by Thursday. She wants hours of her life back. ...

My daughters asked me what careers will survive AI. It is a fair question, and they deserve an honest answer – not the breezy optimism of “nothing to worry about” and not the doom-scrolling pessimism of “all jobs are finished.” The truth is more interesting and more useful than either. I spent some time looking at the serious research. Here is what I found. What the evidence actually says The best current research comes from five major sources, and they tell a more nuanced story than the headlines suggest. ...