My Tracks - April 2026 - Banner

My Tracks - April 2026

A selection of my music production work from April 2026. I move freely between funky house, chillsynth, ballads, techno, hard house and instrumental soundscapes. I build tracks around rhythm, mood and tiny sparks of emotion that grow into something bigger. Some tunes hit hard, some float, some just wander in and make themselves at home. Many of the tracks have been remastered and almost all album art has been updated, so the tracks have been republished. ...

April 30, 2026 · 1 min · James M
Claude connected to Ableton Live and Push

Connecting Claude to Ableton: Why the New Knowledge Connector Matters

On 28 April 2026 Anthropic shipped a batch of nine creative-tool connectors for Claude, and one of them is the Ableton Knowledge connector. It is a small thing on the surface and a big thing underneath. Here is what it does, what it does not do, and why it matters if you spend your evenings inside Live or staring at a Push. What the Connector Actually Does The official Ableton connector grounds Claude’s answers in Ableton’s own product documentation for Live and Push. That is the whole pitch, and it is more useful than it sounds. ...

April 30, 2026 · 4 min · James M
AI Skills banner

AI Skills: One Folder, Any Model

TL;DR A Claude Code skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file - YAML frontmatter plus natural-language instructions - and the same folder works across Cursor, Gemini CLI, Codex, and a dozen other tools The format is model-agnostic because it contains no provider-specific syntax; any instruction-following model can read it, and any harness that loads markdown can execute it Progressive disclosure keeps large skill libraries cheap: only names and descriptions load at session start, with full instructions loading only when a skill is activated The portability is practically valuable - version-controlled runbooks that survive tool switches, model upgrades, and team growth without being rewritten Core skills are genuinely portable; advanced frontmatter extensions (like allowed-tools or context: fork) are tool-specific and may need tuning across harnesses Most of the tooling I have written about over the last year has been provider-specific. A particular model, a particular harness, a particular set of features. The thing I find interesting about agent skills is that they are not. ...

April 30, 2026 · 9 min · James M
Suno AI music platform in May 2026

Suno in May 2026: where the platform actually is

TL;DR - Suno v5.5 (March 2026) is the most expressive model yet, and three personalisation features finally make the platform usable as a real workflow: Voices (clone your own verified singing voice), Custom Models (fine-tune v5.5 on your own catalogue), and My Taste (lightweight preference learning for everyone). The Warner Music deal is now visible in the product - older models are being deprecated, free accounts have lost commercial download rights, and the ownership language has softened from “you own this” to “you have commercial rights.” Best used for demos, stem libraries, and personal sound signatures; still risky for releases that need clean copyright provenance. ...

April 29, 2026 · 6 min · James M
AI-Augmented Design Workflow Banner

My AI-Augmented Design Workflow: A 10-Minute Loop From Discussion to Documented Decision

TL;DR A combination of Cursor in the IDE, Claude Code and Codex in the terminal, and GitHub Spec Kit as the living contract has collapsed the discuss-design-document loop from days to under ten minutes Every meeting is transcribed and checked into GitHub alongside the design corpus, giving AI agents access to the full historical record - not just curated decisions but the debates that shaped them Model selection matters: cheaper, faster models for throwaway sketches and small refactors; expensive models (Opus) for large cross-repo work where the cost of a wrong answer is high The real transformation is cognitive flow - removing friction between thinking and recording means decisions get made and captured while the problem is still fresh, with almost no context switching AI is now suggesting improvements faster than the author can implement them; the next bottleneck is compaction, not generation - asking the model to reduce documents to their load-bearing claims rather than produce more content Since making a combination of Cursor in the IDE and Claude Code and Codex in the terminal the centre of my working day - with ChatGPT for general questions and GitHub Spec Kit holding the design contract - the way I move from a question on Slack to a documented design decision has changed beyond recognition. ...

April 29, 2026 · 14 min · James M
The Free Intelligence Era Banner

The Free Intelligence Era: What Breaks When Thinking Costs Nothing

TL;DR The marginal cost of AI intelligence is halving roughly every two months and heading toward a level where rationing stops making sense - similar to how bandwidth and storage became effectively unconstrained This will break pricing models built on scarce cognition: anything billed per word, per hour, or per consult faces a hard ceiling set by what machines charge for the same work The Jevons paradox means total cognitive work in the economy likely goes up, not down - cheaper thinking means we apply thinking to far more problems, not the same problems more cheaply Three categories of human work survive: accountability (being the named responsible party), taste (choosing well from infinite AI-generated options), and real-world coupling (a body in a place, a relationship that took years to build) The political question of who captures the surplus and who absorbs the transition cost is still open - it will be decided by institutions and policy, not by the technology itself This is a personal reflection, not a forecast dressed up as one. I am writing about a trend I think is real, but the second-order consequences are guesses, and I am sure some of them are wrong. ...

April 28, 2026 · 14 min · James M
The Quiet Discipline of Self-Honesty Banner

The Quiet Discipline of Self-Honesty

Most self-improvement advice assumes a step that almost nobody actually completes. It assumes you have looked at yourself clearly. It assumes you know, with reasonable accuracy, what you are good at, what you avoid, where your time really goes, what you actually want, and what you keep telling yourself to avoid the discomfort of changing. In practice, that step is the bottleneck. You can read every book, follow every system, build every habit tracker, and still go in circles for years if the underlying picture you hold of yourself is slightly off. Goals that match a fictional version of you cannot be reached by the real one. ...

April 28, 2026 · 8 min · James M
The Year 3026 Banner

The Year 3026: Thinking Seriously About a Thousand Years From Now

TL;DR Over a thousand years, the substrate of civilisation changes beyond recognition, but the human core - love, grief, storytelling, the search for meaning - almost certainly does not Computation and energy will have hit their physical cost floors by 3026; intelligence is ambient, woven into the environment so thoroughly that “using AI” becomes as meaningless a phrase as “using oxygen” The built environment is almost certainly at solar-system scale - with the Earth a protected biosphere and heavy industry, compute, and energy capture distributed across the inner solar system No company, currency, or nation founded in 2026 is likely to survive in any meaningful continuity; the middle layer of institutions gets hollowed out, leaving fewer but far longer-lived structures The decisions being made right now - on AI safety, climate, and coordination - have genuinely astronomical consequences, because they determine whether there is a 3026 worth having at all Most writing about the future of AI stops at ten years. A few brave pieces stretch to fifty. I wrote one of the ten-year ones myself in The Next Decade of AI, and the honest reason the horizon stays short is that the uncertainty gets unmanageable much past that. Forecasting even the shape of the economy in 2040 is already mostly vibes. ...

April 26, 2026 · 14 min · James M
The Year 2126 Banner

The Year 2126: What the Next Hundred Years Actually Looks Like

TL;DR By 2126, clean energy, most infectious disease, and routine cognitive work are almost certainly solved - the AI transition will look as obvious in hindsight as the car replacing the horse Climate is the hardest unsolved problem: the outcome depends on decisions made in the next thirty years, and 2126 inherits either a managed problem or a civilisation in partial retreat The demographic inversion is one of the most structurally important facts - global population peaks around 2060-2080 then declines, leaving a world where a hundred-year-old is ordinary and a child is rare and socially valued Human work shifts toward human-presence roles, stewardship of powerful systems, physical craft, meaning-making, and accountability - the categories that cannot be automated The decade we are in now is one that 2126 will study closely; the decisions made about AI safety, climate, and institutional reform are visibly reflected in the outcome a century later A hundred years is a useful distance. Long enough that the current news cycle is ancient history, short enough that some people alive in 2126 will have living memory of people who were alive in 2026. The children being born this week have a non-trivial chance of being interviewed, in their late nineties, about what the early AI era was actually like. That matters. It makes the 100-year horizon a question about the world people we know will inherit, not an abstract one. ...

April 26, 2026 · 17 min · James M
Reading the Signals Four Futures Banner

Reading the Signals: Which of the Four Futures Is Actually Emerging?

TL;DR Scoring four future scenarios against real-world signals: winner-take-most has the clearest corporate and capital logic behind it as of April 2026, driven by vertical integration across chips, data centres, models, and distribution Broad abundance gets partial credit - inference costs have fallen two orders of magnitude and open-weight models are competitive, but institutional-level gains in healthcare and education haven’t materialized Techno-feudalism is quietly accumulating through agentic platform lock-in (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin) and payment rail consolidation, with competition enforcement as the main counterweight Managed transition is the weakest scenario - UBI pilots haven’t scaled nationally, compute taxation remains a proposal, and institutional response cycles are mismatched with AI deployment speed The three signals that will determine where this goes: whether the open-weight frontier gap widens or closes, whether agentic memory becomes portable or platform-owned, and whether any serious economy moves past pilot-scale on redistribution I recently mapped four plausible futures for the machine-speed economy and listed the signals to watch for each. The obvious next question is the one I deliberately held back from answering: which signals are actually firing right now, and what does the mix say about where we’re heading? ...

April 25, 2026 · 7 min · James M