How I passed the AWS AI Business Strategist (AIB-C01) beta with Claude and Notion

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. ...

September 30, 2026 · 8 min · Kashif Nazir

Why I Stopped Using BJJ Notes and Built My Own

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. ...

August 3, 2026 · 4 min · Kashif Nazir

What Actually Moves Between AI Tools

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. ...

July 13, 2026 · 4 min · Kashif Nazir

The Same Confident Voice

Back in May I wrote about asking ChatGPT and Claude where to put my circulator fan in my study. Last week the question was less relaxed and burning. The UK broke its June temperature record three days running, my study is a small room with the sun aimed straight at it, and I went back to both models to see if they could help. What came back read well and annoyingly didn’t work. Both kept telling me to aim the air just above my head, which puts the column over you, and when I said it wasn’t working they’d tell me to nudge it up a little more and that I was nearly there, pointing me the whole time at a placement that wasn’t going to achieve what they calculated. ...

July 1, 2026 · 3 min · Kashif Nazir

What Two AIs Saw in My Study

The biggest change in chat models over the last two years is not the one most articles focus on. It is that they can now actually look at things. Image input went from a feature you would test once and forget about to something I use weekly without thinking about it, and the gap between describing a problem in words and just showing the model what you are looking at turns out to be much bigger than I expected. The first time it really landed for me was a few years ago when I started feeding ChatGPT photos of error screens and bits of hardware I could not be bothered to describe. By the time photo-based questions felt routine I had built up enough trust in ChatGPT specifically that vision tasks became one of the things I would default to it for, even as Claude took over for almost everything else I do. ...

May 10, 2026 · 5 min · Kashif Nazir

What I Stopped Fighting on the SA Pro Recert

The biggest change I made for this AWS recert isn’t which AI I’m using, it’s that I moved my study notes out of OneNote and into Notion. Back in March I wrote about studying with custom GPTs for the AI Practitioner. The note-creation GPT had grown a system prompt that read like a software spec, the coaching one had stayed simple and useful, and the post ended with me saying I’d try Claude as a study partner for the SA Pro and figure out whether to move my notes out of OneNote. ...

May 9, 2026 · 8 min · Kashif Nazir

Building This Site

I’m not a web developer I’m a senior technical architect and my day job is application compatibility, migration, and platform modernisation, figuring out why software breaks when you move it between platforms and fixing it. The tools I reach for are Sysinternals, WinDbg, and Process Hacker, not CSS and JavaScript. Building a website from scratch wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. I’ve wanted a personal site for years but kept putting it off because I didn’t want something that looked like it was built in 2003 on GeoCities (though I do miss the flame borders). I also didn’t want to just use Squarespace or WordPress because I wanted to understand the build. When I moved into a strategy role last year where thought leadership is actually part of the job, the timing finally made sense. AI tools had collapsed the barrier too. What would have taken me weeks of learning web development took about two weeks of evenings and weekends. ...

March 22, 2026 · 7 min · Kashif Nazir