The Journey

Field notes and essays on building practical AI systems — what works, what doesn't, and what changed.

• Local LLM: Why (and When) Running AI on Your Own Hardware Is a Good Idea — Strategy, 2026-07-21. A local LLM is not the same as a private cloud deployment. Here's where the 'nothing leaves the building' architecture actually wins — and where sovereign cloud is usually the better answer.
• What Does a Custom AI Agent System Actually Cost? — Field Notes, 2026-06-03. Treating AI less like a search tool and more like something you give a proper task to. Here's the workflow I've landed on for research, and the prompts that actually make it work.
• Three things I built in Claude Cowork in a matter of hours. — Field Notes, 2026-06-02. Claude Cowork lowered the setup cost for the kind of recurring tasks I knew I should automate but kept letting slide. Here are the first three that stuck.
• I built an AI-native CRM from scratch. Here's what actually happened. — Case Notes, 2026-05-15. CARM started as an experiment — a sovereign, AI-native CRM for a Melbourne consultancy. It became something I'm genuinely proud of. Here's what I built, how it works, and what it taught me.
• What happens when you turn years of consulting knowledge into a conversation? — Case Notes, 2026-05-10. Consulting firms are knowledge businesses. I spent months encoding a consultancy's methodology into AI agents that could actually think through a conversation. Here's what happened.
• Your AI assistant probably knows more about your business than you think. Here's why that should concern you. — Case Notes, 2026-05-20. Most businesses using AI haven't read the terms. For sensitive commercial information, that gap is a real risk. Here's what I built instead.
• What actually changes when you add AI to a business process. — Field Notes, 2026-04-22. Most AI projects either over-promise transformation or under-deliver as a chatbot. The interesting work sits in the middle — quietly rewriting how a process behaves.
• The case for sovereign AI infrastructure in Australia. — Essays, 2026-03-18. Where your data lives matters. For Australian businesses handling sensitive commercial work, the default of US-hosted AI is a decision worth examining.
• Why I stopped recommending Zapier for serious automation. — Field Notes, 2026-02-09. Zapier is a great onboarding tool for automation thinking. It's a poor foundation for anything you actually depend on. Here's where the line falls.