Something appeared on my screen while I was in Codex the other day and I didn’t know what it was. A little animated creature, off to the side, and I don’t know which keys I pressed to bring it up. I clicked it, which made it change to voice mode and so now I couldn’t get rid of it and it was listening to me. In the end I opened ChatGPT in another window and asked how to get rid of the pet that OpenAI’s coding tool had just put on my desktop. ...

I got off the Marker waitlist on a Saturday and planned to poke at it for an hour. It’s a writing tool built by a small team in London that deliberately won’t write for you, which sounds like a limitation until you use it, and what it does instead is read what you’ve written and ask you questions about it. I’ve spent a number of sessions with it now across about two weeks. ...

I ran out of usage in Claude on an afternoon and wanted to carry on working in ChatGPT, which I already use most days for Codex, but I quickly realised the two aren’t set up the same way. The surface comparison is easy. The harder part is what actually survives the move from one tool to another. ...

I finally opened one of the tabs I’d left sitting since I started studying for the AWS recert, a trigger.dev post on Claude Code tips I’d flagged months ago as worth coming back to. Of the ten tips, two were things I didn’t already do, and a couple of the others described features that had changed or gone entirely since it was written. The post wasn’t wrong when it was published, it had just aged, and I’d saved it at the point where saving it felt close enough to reading it. ...

I’m only weeks out from recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional for the second time, and most of the studying is sitting a three-hour practice exam after work and then spending another few hours going back through it afterwards. It’s an architecture exam so it does test patterns, but they’re AWS-specific service combinations, the deep single-vendor recall of one stack, and my actual days are spread across AWS, GCP, Azure, on-prem and a pile of AI tooling, jumping between Windows, Mac and Linux. The exam wants me deep in one place, and real work has been taking me wide for years. ...

I’d written off Claude Cowork before I’d really used it. What changed my mind was having to demo it as part of some cross-company AI training I’m running, which meant finding a reason for it to exist for people who weren’t me. When I went looking for ways to show it to non-technical colleagues, I found things it could do for them that I’d never have looked for on my own behalf. One of them had a job that meant reconciling the same information across three systems, pulling it out of a CRM, checking it against a spreadsheet, then cross-referencing email to confirm the spreadsheet was actually up to date. It took them a good chunk of time every time they did it. By the end I had a flow that did the whole thing on a single click, and none of that was something I’d have gone looking for if I weren’t trying to make the tool make sense to someone else. ...

I had Sora because it came bundled with my ChatGPT subscription, and I used it to make short clips for internal PowerPoints when a slide needed something more than a stock image. Not for anything serious, never built into any work I was doing. When the shutdown announcement landed on 24 March I read it the way I’d read a Microsoft deprecation notice, which is to say I assumed the date would move once enough customers shouted. ...

The visible connector problem is easy to see in cabling. The software version is less visible, but it has the same maintenance shape. Zapier lists more than nine thousand apps it can connect to each other. Nine thousand pieces of software in regular business use that don’t talk to each other natively, and an entire company exists to be the translator between them. ...

A week with a voice-first keyboard still came down to where voice worked and where typing took over. Most voice typing keyboards either transcribe everything you say and leave you to tidy it up, or they do the cleanup in the cloud. The interesting fork is the one that does the cleanup on the device, where the audio never leaves the phone and there is nothing on the other end to send it to. Yaps is one of the few that takes that fork, it is about three weeks old, it was built by one person, and I used it as my only keyboard for a week to see what living with it was actually like. ...

My Mac went in for a screen repair last week, a burn-in issue known on the 2024 model, so I pulled my old Windows laptop off the shelf. It was my workhorse before the Mac, and being back on it properly meant I could verify the experience from the Windows side, which mattered given I’m developing something their users will be testing. The repair was the forcing function: old Windows laptop back into daily use, not as a nostalgia exercise but as the machine I actually had. ...