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The mainstream wheelie project
While the innovative application of generative AI in part 3 of my 2020 Lockdown Wheelie Project is yet to achieve AGI, the idea of sensors, logging, and onboard feedback for mountain bike tricks developed in parts 1 and 2 of the series has now gone mainstream! The Bosch eBike Flow app now includes Trick Check,…
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Hard problems in highly agentic coding
Highly agentic coding with LLMs has great promise: automatically generating software to solve a wide range of problems. But it comes with its own hard problems to solve. With my experience in product design search and optimisation, software development, robotics and manufacturing, it’s an area I’m very interested in understanding better. What I share here…
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Why are teams twelve times faster?
In my writing about team effectiveness something like the following quote might appear: How bad is backlog coupling? At an Australian telecommunications company, my colleagues did a study of hundreds of pieces of work or tasks passing through a delivery centre. Some tasks could be completed by a single team without dependency, specifically without scheduling…
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The life-changing magic of tidying your data
After tackling data waste for some years now, I thought it would be fun to revisit the Marie Kondo approach to tidying up work in large organisations (from 10 years ago), and apply it to data too… Surprise! Managing work data in a large organisation is a lot like keeping your belongings in check at…
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trippler – and resilience for all
After driving an EV at possibly the busiest Australian road-tripping time of the year (Easter), in the middle of a global fossil fuel crisis and concomitant surge in local EV sales, I decided it was time to make good on my claim that resilient planning by individuals could benefit all drivers. In practice, this means…
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Antifragile AI Architectures
AI is full of contradictions: capable but unreliable, local improvements create externalities, generalist models are evaluated against specific criteria, and so on. Antifragility is a framework that deals in contradictions too, and seems an appropriate lens through which to explore AI systems architecture, as I had used it in an earlier era to explore hand-crafted…
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Data and AI mini blogs
A brief reflection on Thoughtworks Australia Data & AI mini-blogs. From May 2021, we set ourselves a target to publish a short blog on a different AI, ML or data topic every week. Here’s the pitch from the landing page: Bite-sized content delivering valuable insights from Thoughtworkers who wrestle varied client problems week in and…
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LLMs are lineage black holes
Data lineage is important to most organisations, even if they don’t make use of it. Systematically capturing the upstream provenance and downstream consumers of any piece of data is critical to trusting the utility of that data and understanding its impacts, at any scale beyond a handful of excel spreadsheets. The nature of lineage When…
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LLMs as text simulators
I’ve often written here about developing systems that leverage simulation. Simulation combining physical processes, information systems, and crowd behaviours. Simulations that support organisational decision making, customer experiences, and learning. And in late 2025 we were having a moment where more people were starting to describe Large Language Models (LLMs) as simulators of text. Simulation of…
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trippler at Melbourne Python meetup
I recently presented a version of my PyConAU trippler talk at the February 2026 Melbourne Python meetup. I made a few minor updates, such as incorporating the new contingency and multi-destination functionality, and this may have caused me to run a little over time… Running a little over time must have angered whatever deities watch…