Microsoft’s annual developer conference, Build, kicked off at 3am Melbourne time on Wednesday. I didn’t stay up to watch - but I’ve absorbed the media releases and technical docs, and there’s a genuine shift happening here that’s worth unpacking.

TL;DR for the non-technical: AI assistants are about to get much more capable, but that creates a trust problem - how do you let a smart assistant do things on your computer without giving it the keys to everything? Microsoft just announced that Windows itself will act as the security guard. It will control exactly what an AI assistant can see and touch on your machine, track what it does separately from what you do and run smaller AI models directly on your computer so your data doesn’t have to leave your desk. Think of it as giving your AI assistant its own office with its own keycard, instead of letting it wander freely through yours. The catch: it needs newer, more powerful hardware to work properly, and most of it isn’t shipping yet.

Now, the details.

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The Tifosi are furious, and they are aiming at the wrong target. The Ferrari Luce, Maranello’s first production electric car, was unveiled near Rome on 25 May to a wave of revulsion. “A Nissan Leaf with a prancing horse,” said the internet. Nissan, delighted, leaned in and thanked Ferrari for the compliment. The market was less amused. Ferrari shares fell more than eight per cent in Milan and over five per cent in New York the next morning. For a marque that has sold beauty for almost eighty years, that is a remarkable thing to do with a single reveal.

But the styling is not the story. The styling is a symptom.

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Last time it was the cables lying to you. You binned the mystery leads, bought the certified ones with the speed and watts printed on the side, labelled the survivors. Good. You fixed the drawer.

Now look at the laptop itself, because it is about to play the same trick on you. Two ports, same oval socket, same confident silver moulding. One is fast. One is not. And nothing on the outside tells you which is which.

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Open the drawer where you keep your cables. Go on. Somewhere in that tangle are two USB-C cables that look identical, came in similar boxes and feel the same in your hand. One will charge your laptop at full speed and drive a 4K monitor. The other can barely run a mouse.

The connector tells you nothing. That is the whole problem.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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