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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
Geir Isene sat down at his computer last week and realised something unusual. Almost every program he touched - the window manager, the text editor, the file manager, the terminal, the email client, the calendar - was software he wrote himself. In a few weeks, with Claude Code as his engineering partner, he had replaced his entire desktop computing environment. All of it command line. All of it terminal-native. All of it his.