“…what lies at the heart of economics is wellbeing, not income. As Australian-born economist Justin Wolfers notes, economics is no more about money than architecture is about inches. Money is a useful measuring tool when comparing costs and benefits, but it is not the ultimate end goal.” The Shortest History of Economics by Andrew Leigh
I built Felix myself. With a lot of help.
The vibe coding workflow goes like this: you have an itch, you describe it to Claude, you argue back and forth about implementation details you half-understand and Claude half-understands, and eventually something exists that didn’t before. Felix exists this way. A small personal app I’ve been nudging and extending for a few months, named for Felix the Catalog (a nod to the ancient Aussie penned cartoon series).
The original brief was modest. A way to manage all the bookmarks I was accumulating by starring items in RSS lists I read. The problem with list apps is they’re either too simple to be useful or too powerful to be fast. Felix landed exactly where I needed it.
Most technology advice from 2007 is obsolete. This clip is not.
Steve Jobs is explaining why Apple wasn’t doing more to chase the PC market. The analysts kept asking. Apple had around 5% of the market at the time. Why not cut prices, increase volume, grow the number?
His answer was almost resigned: we just can’t ship junk.
Not “we’ve chosen not to.” Not “our strategy prioritises premium positioning.” A statement of fact about what Apple is actually capable of doing as a company. To pursue share through price cuts and quality compromise would be to become a different business entirely - and not one worth becoming.
TL;DR — Alberta’s Provincial Government replaced two failing legacy IT systems in 10 months for an estimated $2.64 million total. Vendors had quoted $54 million for one system, almost certainly heading to $100 million. AI tools — particularly Gemini’s vision capabilities — compressed months of requirements work into minutes. The bottleneck wasn’t technology. It was leadership willing to ask whether there was another way. Almost everyone wins when governments do this.
A confirmation email landed in my inbox this week. VIC N Drive Meet. A curated backroads blast with a bunch of fellow Nthusiasts, organised by Hyundai N Australia.
I’m a lifelong revhead. The smell of a good back road on a cool morning, a car that actually wants to be driven hard, and people who feel the same way about it - that’s a perfect Saturday. The i30 N is the best bang-for-buck hot hatch on the market, and I’ll die on that hill.
I’m registered, I’m keen, and I already had the booking email and a calendar entry sorted.
Then I asked Claude Cowork a simple question: “I have these details in my calendar and Gmail - should I capture this information elsewhere? Why? How?"
“I end each day exhausted — not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.” — Francesco Bonacci, founder of Cua AI
The pitch for AI in the workplace has always been about output: write faster, analyse more, respond at scale. And the tools deliver on that. They deliver relentlessly. The problem is that more output doesn’t automatically mean more throughput. Sometimes it means more to review, more to cross-check, more decisions to make before anything ships.
My last website was built in 2014. Not “maintained in 2014” - built from scratch, tweaked, launched and then mostly left alone. Since then, the skills have sat in a corner gathering dust, relevant only to projects that drifted off the priority list and stayed there.
So when I recently spun up something new and realised the www subdomain wasn’t resolving - visitors typing www.whatever were hitting nothing - I did that familiar thing: the slow, reluctant calculation of how much time it was going to take to remember what a DNS record even is, which type I needed and where exactly in the interface the setting lived.
I logged into Cloudflare. And then, mostly out of curiosity, I tried the help bot.
Every few months, another “how to set up Obsidian so it really works for you” essay does the rounds.
This morning I found yet another one. It looked good. Genuinely thorough. The kind of post where someone has clearly spent weeks refining their setup and another week writing about it.
And I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
Do I read it now? File it somewhere? But where? The irony of not knowing how to file a productivity system article inside your productivity system is not lost on me.
Relentless Productivity™ has a dark side. The more capable your tools, the faster the work accumulates - and with Claude Cowork, that accumulation happens session by session, each one spawning its own entry in an ever-growing sidebar list that becomes harder to read by the day. I know this from experience. My Cowork sidebar had grown to the point where I could no longer tell what was live, what was done and what was waiting.
Two thirds of the weight comes back within a year of stopping Ozempic. I keep thinking about that number. And I keep coming back to a diet book published in 1991 that understood exactly why. The book is called The Hacker’s Diet. It was written by John Walker - co-founder of Autodesk and the original programmer behind AutoCAD. By his late thirties Walker had tried everything. Nothing worked. So he did what engineers do: he stripped the problem back to first principles, built a measurement system and ran the experiment on himself.