This last week has shown me something I already suspected but hadn’t quite felt at full intensity: Claude Cowork is an extraordinary instrument for anyone who lives inside office documents.

The setup is simple but the implications are not. You create a project folder, point Cowork at it, and from that moment the work has a home. The folder holds the files, the instructions, the memory. If you keep it local and disciplined, Cowork stays anchored to what’s in there. You can extend it with connectors and browsing if you need to, but you don’t have to.

Continue reading →

I’ve never been good at budgeting - just worked on having enough. Never overspent. But now things are different. If I was on a standard Claude Pro plan I’d been in deep overdraft. Even on Claude Max (5x limit) I am bumping up against it. But worth it to tap into some incredible tools. Good to use with this weekly budget as I can before it renews in 8-9 hours, however, my short-term session target (5 hours) is capping me.

Continue reading →

Matt Round’s DataCenter.FM hands you the controls of a simulated server farm. Move sliders, flick switches, push servers, cooling, gas turbines and construction crews from a gentle whir to a screaming cacophony with flashing warning lights. Eight audio loops and 27 alarms do the heavy lifting.

Continue reading →

Monty Python and the Holy Grail leaves SBS On Demand on 2 May. If that sentence doesn’t get you moving, nothing will.

This is the third month I’ve run the same process: feed Claude the SBS “what’s leaving” page, filter out series, cross-reference every standalone title against IMDB, keep anything rated 7.0 or above. Six parallel agents, four minutes, done. March had 57 qualifying films. April had 74. May has 71. Note: the numbers in brackets are IMDB ratings out of 10.

Continue reading →

AI has made me more tired than I’ve ever been in my career.

Not from overwork in the traditional sense. The hours are fine. The problem is the pace. I can iterate on an iOS app three times faster than I can actually test it. Claude ships a new build; I’m still tapping through the previous one. The work is compressing into a loop of generate, review, generate, review and the reviews are the bottleneck. My brain is the bottleneck.

A 20-minute coffee nap most afternoons has made a measurable difference. And the reason it works is genuinely interesting.

Continue reading →

Nobody writes documentation. Especially not for their own machine. It’s the work everyone agrees is important and nobody does. The reasons are obvious. It’s tedious. It’s never urgent until something breaks. And by then the person who set the thing up (you, six months ago) has forgotten the bits that matter. This weekend I added complexity to my Mac that I knew I’d regret. I installed Ollama. Pulled down nine local models, ~115 GB of weights.

Continue reading →

On 24 April 2026, every single member of America’s National Science Board received the same boilerplate email. Twenty-four scientists and engineers, appointed to govern the $9 billion National Science Foundation, were told their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.” Thank you for your service. No explanation. No warning.

That is not how a serious country behaves.

The NSB was established in 1950. Its whole purpose is to provide continuity across administrations, a stable hand on the tiller of US federal science regardless of who sits in the White House. It was designed specifically so that research policy could not be held hostage to electoral whims. Firing the lot of them in a single email blast is not policy. It’s vandalism.

Continue reading →

This one is for developers and vibe coders. Everyone else, feel free to skip.

The short version: Anthropic are listening, refining their tools based on feedback, and shipping at a pace that is genuinely hard to keep up with. The tools keep getting better, which just encourages everyone to hit their servers harder.

Every time Claude Code wants to run a shell command, edit a file, or call an MCP tool, it stops and asks. The first time, this feels right. By the thirtieth time in a session, it feels like a co-worker who needs written authorisation to use the stapler.

Continue reading →

I switched my default to Opus 4.7 the day it shipped. A few days later I hit my rolling 5-hour usage limit on claude.ai. Then I hit it again. By the third lockout in one day I was puzzled.

Hmm. This hadn’t happened before.

I’d been running Opus 4.7 as the default for everything. Code, writing, casual queries, illuminated business plans. Anything that needed a model, it got the newest, shiniest one.

Turns out the new shiny one is hungry. Very hungry.

Continue reading →