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.
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.
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.
As I prepared to race out the door this morning, I snatched up the hand-scribbled agenda for the team meeting and thought: “Oh, at a minimum, I should photograph this.” So I don’t lose the piece of paper. The next thought was: “Hey, I should send this to Claude.” Before I knew it, Claude had read it and turned it into a proper document - ready to throw into the stack for the day ahead.
A friend of mine, let’s call her Jane, runs a marketing consultancy. Fifteen years in, small team, strong client list, had used Claude for chat only. I offered to spend an hour showing her what’s possible now we’re well beyond that. Wednesday night I realised winging a 75-minute demo next morning would burn too much time on navigation and too little on value. I opened Claude Cowork, uploaded a brief I’d quickly hacked together from emails and went on with my evening.