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.

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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?"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I received some of my annual medical test results this week and needed to redact my personal details before sharing them. Standard stuff - name, date of birth, Medicare number, address. But the files were JPEGs, not a Word document I could just edit. My first instinct was to upload them to Claude and let it handle everything. Then I stopped myself. Medical records. Cloud service. Maybe not. I have a full local LLM stack running on my Mac - Open WebUI fronting Ollama, with Gemma and Qwen among the models available.

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For two decades, every question started the same way: open a browser, type, hunt. Google built that world. That era is ending.

Since the World Wide Web went mainstream, every major behaviour pattern on the internet has been built around one fundamental act: the human search. Type a query, receive links, hunt through documents, form a conclusion. It was extraordinary. Billions of people sharing information across the planet, instantaneously. And it made Google one of the most powerful companies ever built.

Now watch it dissolve.

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Years ago I was endlessly lectured by ‘real designers’ that white space was ‘a good thing’. Not every surface of a page, screen or wall needs to be filled. Indeed you need empty spaces (white spaces) to let a design or scene to breath; to ensure that what you are presenting stands out. Here we have the opposite of ‘white space’. This blurry chap seems to want to fill every space with some gold swirlygig.

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