AI

I sat the AWS Certified AI Business Strategist beta on 29 September 2026, the first day it was available worldwide, and passed. If you copy anything from this, do the Claude drills first to get an idea of what kind of material you might already know, and for sure build a fact sheet, because that covers off the rote questions where logic won’t work. AWS Certified AI Business Strategist Early Adopter In this guide The setup at a glance Why I needed this What you need Start with the business problem The steps 1. Put everything in the project first 2. Set up the instructions 3. Let Claude build the Notion pages 4. Ask for drills early 5. Put each practice test review in Notion as its own page 6. Start the Fact Sheet on day one My run through it What I used for AIB-C01 Checking the result What fought back What I’ll take back to work Limits The setup at a glance AIB-C01 2026 hub (dashboard: scores, repeat misses, overrides, gaps, session log) Study Noteswhy an answer is right, in syllabus order Rulescue → answer, grouped by stem question Fact Sheetstraight facts and lists, one line each Quiz Databaseevery missed or shaky question, one row each Last nightrepeat misses and exam technique, one phone screen Frameworks & Standardsoptional, for framework structure This is the layout my instructions now build, reworked the day after the exam from the pages I used for AIB-C01. A Claude project holds the instructions and reads and writes these pages through the Notion connector, and so every drill, practice test and miss lands in them. ...

Earlier this week I was at the TailscaleUp event in London and one of the panels raised that we are losing sight of how long work actually takes. This also connected with the idea that in this new AI future there will be 100x more builders. That means there will be 100x more people who’ve never felt the gap between a working prototype and a production-ready product, and AI has vastly reduced the barriers to building, but there are still some hard things that need to be understood. ...

I started writing this piece at lunchtime, well, speaking it, that is. Recently getting a trial subscription with Whispr Flow which can mostly understand my Brummie accent better than Samsung or Google (I have tested!). Has meant that my MSN based typing speed now pales in comparison to the wonder of me talking at length instead. At the start of the year I think I might have fallen into the new years trap. It’s time to finally master all those things I said I was going to learn and this time i’m not going to make any excuses. Shockingly, every year that has happened, life has found a way to make excuses possible. The perfect example for this was setting up a website. I knew all the component parts required: ...

Two weeks ago I built an Android application with voice commands while running around an athletic track in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium in London. So when I decided to try building a web app en route to a big group weekend away, it did not feel as far fetched as it once would have. The first commit went in from the Eurostar terminal, before I had boarded. I did not have a laptop, and was going to have to do the whole build with just my phone. Recent hackathons, and a few sites of my own, had taught me what works and what does not, and importantly what I could accomplish with just my phone. The build ran on the train until the channel tunnel killed the connection, and I picked it back up on the Métro in Paris. The only real time I needed to stop was to arrange the Cloudflare access the agent needed. Before walking to my hotel I sat down on the Métro platform to run through the online setup, because it was fiddly, and the Métro had been extremely hot the whole way so far. After this I could let it start building reusing methods for setup from previous projects and my existing domain to get a useable subdomain. ...

I’ve spent the last few weeks building across a few different AI coding tools, and I stopped paying much attention to the model underneath. You spend enough time around AI and you start to believe the model is the part that matters, since it’s what everyone talks about and all the benchmarking is against. But build across enough tools in a short stretch and a different picture shows up. The model is closer to an interchangeable component, and the setup wrapped around it is what decides success. ...

The first time I used Kiro was at the AWS Summit in London earlier this year. It was a hands-on workshop, so on the rails run through to show what the tool could do. Everyone was converging on the same idea at that point, that the spec was what mattered, and it all felt a bit contrived from Kiro just formalising it. The first time I used Kiro was in a guided workshop at AWS Summit London. ...

I have been building locally with AI over the past year and I wanted to start moving what I had truly online. Taking something from prototype to hosted is normal work in my day to day. Doing it with no platform team behind me is a different story, because everything that machine had been covering for was suddenly mine to build. Your machine in every case, is the boundary. On your own laptop you’re the whole system whether you meant to be or not, it’s your logins, network and various local dependencies. Point a public URL at the same code and it’s doubtful to work (well safely). In a company a separate team is usually overseeing the security model and the various components. ...

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. ...

Somebody asked me at training how I keep my notes, and I told them I nearly paid for an app back in May and then went and built a simple system myself instead. I’d been keeping notes for about two years by then. First in BJJ Notes app, which I started using in Canada in my first year. I just stayed on the free tier because I wasn’t going to run a subscription to store a paragraph about where I should have my knees. At that point everything went into Google Keep and so it sat in with the shopping and other stray thoughts. Neither of them worked and it wasn’t really the apps’ fault. ...