Author: James Andrew
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I noticed I had stopped opening search results. Not completely. For train bookings or café hours, I still clicked. But for ordinary questions—how to fix a Gmail filter, which USB-C cable I needed, whether a strange Windows process was normal—I had started reading the AI answer and moving on. It felt efficient. It also felt…
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Here’s a painfully ordinary story. Someone uses the same password for Gmail, Netflix, LinkedIn and a shopping site they forgot about years ago. It’s a decent password, by normal human standards. It has a capital letter, a number and one of those exclamation marks websites keep requesting as if punctuation can defeat crime. Then the…
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The easiest way to spot fake DevOps is to watch what happens after a bad release. The deployment finishes. Customers begin reporting errors. Slack fills with screenshots. Then somebody says, “The pipeline passed, so this must be an operations issue.” There it is. A company can have Kubernetes, Terraform, automated tests and enough dashboards to…
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A laptop disconnected from Wi-Fi used to become noticeably less clever. Email stopped. Cloud documents complained. Search disappeared. AI tools, especially, became blank boxes waiting for a network connection. That is changing faster than I expected. Phones and laptops are increasingly able to run useful AI models directly on the device. Not the biggest models…
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Docker confused me for longer than I like to admit. I understood the words individually. Image. Container. Volume. Port. None sounded difficult. Put them together in a terminal command, though, and it felt like operating rented machinery without the paperwork. Then I joined a small project where setup took most of an afternoon. The app…
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A familiar office scene: someone asks an internal AI assistant about the company’s travel policy. The answer appears in seconds, written with the calm confidence these systems have even when they’re making things up. The employee reads it, nods, and nearly books a hotel outside the allowed limit. The AI found an old policy document.…
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A colleague once showed me a prompt he was unusually proud of. It was almost two pages long—headings, rules, role descriptions, forbidden phrases and a stern warning that the AI must “think carefully before responding.” He called it his master prompt. It worked for three weeks. Then the team changed the kind of report they…
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A friend built an employee leave tracker over a weekend. He wasn’t a developer. He described the screens to an AI coding tool, copied a few error messages back into the chat, and kept clicking “accept” whenever new code appeared. By Sunday evening, the app looked surprisingly good. Employees could request leave. Managers could approve…