https://writing.bustamantedick.com/posts/Recent content in Posts on Simon Bustamante-DickHugoen-gbSat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/the-friction-was-the-thinking/Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/the-friction-was-the-thinking/<h1 id="the-friction-was-the-thinking">The Friction Was the Thinking</h1> <p>I&rsquo;m writing this in bed, on my laptop, at an hour I will not admit to.</p> <p>I could tell you I&rsquo;m doing it because the idea wouldn&rsquo;t wait. The honest version is that I&rsquo;ve started to enjoy the shipping more than the sleeping — and I&rsquo;ve watched enough other people do the same that I no longer think it&rsquo;s just me. A few weeks ago a colleague told me, half-proud and half-haunted, that she&rsquo;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.</p>https://writing.bustamantedick.com/has-isleworth-actually-got-worse/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/has-isleworth-actually-got-worse/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&#39;t sit right.https://writing.bustamantedick.com/battery-simulator/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/battery-simulator/I built an open-source simulator that models battery savings across Octopus Agile, Intelligent Go, and flat tariffs using real half-hourly rate data. The results were not what I expected.https://writing.bustamantedick.com/personal-ai-teams/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/personal-ai-teams/Personalised AI systems built by individuals outperform standardised enterprise deployments. Here is why, and how to get started.https://writing.bustamantedick.com/home-battery-2026/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/home-battery-2026/A home battery, a tariff switch, and some automation. The numbers are specific to my household but the framework applies to anyone willing to do the maths.https://writing.bustamantedick.com/cognitive-load-ai-teams/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/cognitive-load-ai-teams/<h1 id="your-ai-team-will-drown-you-if-you-let-it">Your AI Team Will Drown You (If You Let It)</h1> <p>It took five days.</p> <p>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 &ndash; 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.</p>https://writing.bustamantedick.com/your-personal-ai-a-practical-guide-for-people-who-dont-care-about-technology/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/your-personal-ai-a-practical-guide-for-people-who-dont-care-about-technology/<p>My wife read my last article &ndash; the one about building AI teams and not relying on off-the-shelf tools &ndash; and her response was immediate and completely fair: &ldquo;That&rsquo;s great. But how do I actually start?&rdquo;</p> <p>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.</p>https://writing.bustamantedick.com/ai-careers-young-people/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writing.bustamantedick.com/ai-careers-young-people/My daughters asked what careers will survive AI. Here is the honest, well-sourced answer -- neither dismissively optimistic nor needlessly alarming.