Writing software code is no longer a scarce or expensive activity. In fact, at scale, it now costs less than a fast food worker’s hourly wage. That sounds implausible until you separate coding from engineering and look at what autonomous AI systems are already doing today.

A technique called the Ralph Wiggum Loop is quietly reshaping how software gets made. Named after the persistent, never-give-up character from The Simpsons, it runs an AI coding agent in a simple loop, feeding it the same core prompt repeatedly until the job is done. No coffee breaks. No sleep. No complaints about the brief.

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I could only read one chapter a day. That’s not hyperbole or literary flourish. It’s what Dark Emu demanded of me. Each chapter so thoroughly upended what I thought I knew about this continent that I needed time to sit with the disorientation before continuing.

As Australia Day arrives again, it seems worth sharing why.

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For years, the politics of US immigration enforcement rested on an implicit bargain: this is about them, not us. The raids, the detention centres, the armed agents: these were tools pointed at a specific population. If you were a citizen, if you were white, if you were armed and law-abiding, you weren’t affected.

Minneapolis has shattered that bargain in the space of three weeks.

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From twelve thousand kilometres away, I’m watching the United States tear up its founding document in real time.

The country is in a Cold Civil War. It’s fought on two fronts: online, where narratives are deployed within minutes of a killing to pre-empt sympathy for the dead; and on the streets, where federal agents operate as an occupying force in American cities.

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Tom Hiddleston introduced me to Heat before Pacino or De Niro did.

His impression on Graham Norton, hamming up the famous diner scene for laughs, somehow captured the weight of the original. I watched it, laughed, and filed it away.

Months later, past midnight on Netflix, I finally saw what he was channelling.

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It’s now as hard to imagine working without AI tools as it once was to imagine life before Google Search. Here’s my toolkit in early 2026: what I pay for, what I rely on daily and why.

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“They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

That’s what Trump said at Davos about America’s NATO and NATO-aligned allies in Afghanistan. Two decades of sacrifice dismissed with a casual lie.

Here’s what “a little back” looks like:

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“I asked AI to produce a summary infographic for me… I find these easier and quicker to get initial concepts.”

My friend Steve F posted this alongside a visual breakdown of Celeste Headlee’s TED Talk on better conversations. Not a link to watch later. Not a recommendation I’d forget. A compressed, scannable summary he’d created in minutes.

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