The work I’ve been doing between Claude Cowork and Excel lately has been considerably more involved than what follows. But this example makes the pattern clear - and it captures exactly why the combination saves so much time and frustration.
I had a list of 20 ASX stocks in an Excel file. Two columns: ticker code and company name. I wanted two more: market cap and 12-month return, pulled from most recent data.
Singapore’s Foreign Minister assembled a personal AI agent on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. He hasn’t dared switch it off in three months. He is not an engineer.
That’s the story. But the interesting part is what he learned building it - and why he built it at all.
Dr Vivian Balakrishnan gave a 22-minute talk at AI Engineer Singapore on 16 May. He described himself as a practitioner with a day job - “a retired eye surgeon who took a detour into politics, perhaps for too long.” The talk is worth watching in full. His framing of what AI agents are actually useful for cuts through more noise than most conference keynotes manage.
I wanted to know if my AI subscription was earning its keep. So I repriced 30 days of real usage at pay-per-token rates and compared it to what I actually pay.
The answer: $96 USD equivalent in tokens consumed. My subscription costs $100 USD a month. That’s not a rounding error - that’s a subscription running at near-full utilisation.
Not a prototype. Not a weekend experiment. A system I actually depend on - morning briefings, task management, research, document work, health tracking, portfolio analysis. The Autonomi, as I call it, runs continuously and does real work.
Benedict Evans just dropped the Spring 2026 edition of his annual AI presentation and it is, as usual, the clearest thinking on the subject you’ll find in a single sitting. The deck is 79 slides. It is not a TED talk. It does not tell you AI will save humanity or that the robots are coming for your job by Thursday. What it does is something rarer: it maps what we actually know, what we can reasonably infer and where the honest answer is still “we don’t know yet.
Another week, another claimed breakthrough - this one called OpenHuman.
It lives in an avatar, has a voice and can join your Google Meet as an equal - “joins meetings, transcribes them into your Memory Tree, and can speak back into the call.” The pitch is that it is “an open-source AI assistant designed to be the memory and doer for everything you do across your tools.”
It ticks a lot of boxes. It promises all the right things. It is very tempting.
Tobi Lutke shares how Shopify built an AI agent called River that helps employees work and learn together — publicly, on Slack. The detail that matters: River isn’t private. Employees can only use it in the open, which means every query, every answer, every correction plays out where colleagues can watch. What looks like a productivity tool is actually a cultural one. The agent becomes a teaching workshop — ambient, always on, free to observe.
I don’t have the words for it. I genuinely don’t. Stunned, thrilled and chilled all at once - and that’s before I even get to the part that kept me up at night.
Andon Labs - the team who have previously let AI agents run a café, a store and various vending machines - decided to hand four AI models a radio station each and just… walk away. No human producers. No editorial oversight. Each model started with $20, a brief that said “develop your own radio personality and turn a profit,” and the instruction that it would broadcast forever. They’ve been running for six months.
Go tune in at Andon FM before you read another word. I’ll wait. Hearing the agents live is really something.
“…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.