The Universe Has a Plan for You

On Adversity, Awakening, and Rediscovering Who You Are Most of us don’t find our life’s purpose in a single moment of calm reflection. We find it in the wreckage. We find it in the sleepless nights, the boxes we didn’t pack, the home we no longer live in. We find it when we are forced - absolutely forced - to stop, strip everything back, and ask: who am I without all of this? ...

March 12, 2026 · 10 min · James M
Where Should Documentation Live Banner

Where Should Documentation Actually Live? Thinking Out Loud in the AI Era

TL;DR Documentation sprawl across Confluence, Jira, SharePoint, Google Docs, GitHub, and Miro is not a tool problem - it is a joints problem: the same decision exists in four places, drifting out of sync immediately Three forces constantly pull against each other: source of truth (one canonical home), discoverability (right surface for every audience), and governance (real access control) - optimising for any one breaks the others The proposed shape: docs-as-code for engineering artefacts in Git, collaborative tools for business content, a read-only render layer between them, and an AI-assisted discovery layer across all of it AI tooling weakens the old boundary - a business user can get a summary generated from a markdown master without ever seeing the file, and an engineer can draft an ADR pulling context from Confluence and Jira automatically Several genuine open questions remain unsolved: versioning across boundaries, who owns the render pipeline, and whether Jira tickets as documents should be formalised or fought against This post is me thinking out loud. It is not a proposal, not a recommended pattern, and possibly not even a useful framing. I am writing it because I am actively stuck on the question, and writing in public tends to be the fastest way I find out what I have got wrong. Feel free to disagree with any of it. ...

March 12, 2026 · 11 min · James M
Junior Developer Pipeline Problem Banner

The Junior Developer Pipeline Problem: Where Do Tomorrow's Seniors Come From?

TL;DR The work AI now automates - boring tickets, bug hunts, boilerplate - was the unspoken apprenticeship that turned juniors into seniors The skills that work built (pattern recognition, systems intuition, taste, calibration) are built by doing, not by reading - and that doing is now cheapest to delegate The new apprenticeship shifts toward reading over writing, debugging agent output, earlier architectural decisions, and deliberate practice of things agents do badly There is a coordination problem: individual organisations rationally skip junior investment in the short term, but the senior pipeline thins industry-wide a few years later If you are starting out today, optimise for proximity to a great senior engineer above salary, title, or any other variable The views in this post are my own personal reflections on the industry as a whole, written in my own time. They are not about any specific employer, team, or colleague, past or present. ...

March 12, 2026 · 11 min · James M

We Are Learning to Buy Intelligence

TL;DR For most of history, usable intelligence - the kind that solves complex problems - required hiring expensive specialists or spending years acquiring expertise yourself Research shows the cost of running AI capability has been falling roughly an order of magnitude every one to two years, making intelligence increasingly affordable Intelligence is becoming infrastructure - like electricity or compute, available on demand through APIs rather than locked inside individuals or institutions When intelligence is cheap and abundant, creativity becomes the limiting factor, not knowledge, credentials, or access to experts This democratisation is extraordinary, but the question of how we deploy these tools wisely matters as much as the capability itself For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce. Not intelligence in the biological sense - people have always been clever - but usable intelligence. The kind that helps you design a system, debug a problem, write code, plan a strategy, analyse data, or turn a vague idea into something real. ...

March 11, 2026 · 5 min · James M

OpenClaw Is Absolutely Wild

TL;DR OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework that enables language models to operate software directly through computer interfaces - clicking, typing, and navigating the same way a human does Unlike chatbots that only respond to prompts, OpenClaw acts as an operator - automating any software without requiring custom APIs or integrations This makes legacy enterprise software, complex dashboards, and multi-application workflows instantly automatable using computer vision and reasoning models Because it uses reasoning models rather than fixed scripts, it can adapt to unexpected states and recover from mistakes - closer to digital labor than traditional automation This represents a shift in computing: software that can build, run, and manage other software, driven by open projects improving rapidly every month Every now and then a piece of technology appears that quietly changes the rules. Not in a loud marketing way. Not with a huge product launch. Just a project sitting on GitHub that makes you stop, stare at the screen for a second, and think: ...

March 10, 2026 · 4 min · James M

Scaling Graph Algorithms: From Prototypes to Production

Graph algorithms work great on your laptop. PageRank on a 100,000-node graph finishes in seconds. Louvain finds communities instantly. Then you try it on production data - a graph with 5 billion nodes and 50 billion edges - and suddenly everything takes hours, consumes terabytes of memory, and melts your infrastructure. The jump from prototyping to production in graph algorithms is steep. But it’s a known problem with known solutions. ...

March 9, 2026 · 7 min · James M

The Yamaha DX7: The Most Influential Synthesizer Ever Made

The Yamaha DX7 wasn’t the first synthesizer. It wasn’t the most powerful. It wasn’t the cheapest. But in 1983, it became the most important instrument released that decade - and arguably the most influential synthesizer in history. By 1989, over 200,000 units had been sold. Today, it remains the second-best-selling synthesizer of all time (after the Casio VL-Tone, which was technically a calculator with a synth). Here’s why that matters: the DX7 didn’t just change synthesizer design. It fundamentally altered how modern music sounds. ...

March 9, 2026 · 8 min · James M

Claude Code Just Got a Serious Code Review Feature

TL;DR Claude Code’s new Code Review feature dispatches multiple AI agents in parallel to review a PR from different angles, rather than running a single shallow model pass over the diff The motivation is real: Anthropic’s internal code output per engineer increased by around 200%, making human review the bottleneck - and humans consistently miss subtle bugs on large diffs Multi-agent review cross-checks findings, filters false positives, and ranks issues by severity before posting a clean, high-signal review comment plus inline annotations Review depth scales with PR size; typical runs take about 20 minutes and cost $15 - $25, which is cheap compared to the cost of a production bug Humans still approve PRs - the tool’s role is a thorough pre-review pass, not automated sign-off, making it a complement to human judgment rather than a replacement I genuinely think a lot of people still underestimate how fast the AI developer tooling ecosystem is evolving. ...

March 9, 2026 · 5 min · James M

Hitting Claude Code Limits? Here’s the Setup I’m Moving Toward

TL;DR Hitting Claude Code Pro usage limits does not mean upgrading to the $200/month plan - a hybrid AI stack is a smarter and cheaper alternative The tiering strategy: local models (free) for quick edits, cheap cloud APIs for general coding, and frontier models only for architecture or complex multi-file reasoning Tools like Ollama or LM Studio with coding models such as DeepSeek Coder or Qwen2.5 handle the majority of everyday tasks locally at no cost Cheap cloud inference providers (Groq, Together AI, DeepInfra) offer capable open models at fractions of a cent per session for heavier work A realistic usage split of 80% local / 15% cheap APIs / 5% frontier models dramatically reduces limit burn while keeping Claude available when it genuinely matters I keep running into the same problem with Claude Code Pro ($20/month): I burn through the usage limits faster than I expect. The obvious solution is upgrading to the $200/month plan, but that feels excessive for how I actually use it. ...

March 9, 2026 · 4 min · James M

My Tracks - March 2026

A selection of my music production work from March 2026. Browse other months All Tracks

March 1, 2026 · 1 min · James M