A Kiwi - Generating, Publishing, and Tinkering - with AI.
Vibe coding, sharing ideas, and building small products. Some are polished; some are gloriously half-built — because life ships as a prototype first.
Extending the Experiment I saw this TechRadar article and thought—what would ChatGPT say about “EA”? Spoiler: ChatGPT first assumed I meant Executive Assistant—and honestly, it nailed it. They’re the understated powerhouse behind the scenes. The TechRadar piece that sparked this reads beautifully simple: a Senior Data Analytics Consultant becomes “someone who counts toys and tells people which toys are played with the most.” A journalist turns into a curious storyteller, a management consultant is a fixer of lemonade stands, a CTO is a ship’s technology captain steering through storms. It’s equal parts hilarious and enlightening—stripping away jargon to reveal the human heart of a job. Read it here ...
Today I want to talk about Shadow IT. Not Shadow AI — I’ll cover that another day. Shadow IT is those tools and systems folks spin up outside IT’s blessing: sprawling Excel workbooks, legacy Access databases, SaaS apps bought quietly. They’re not always reckless — most of the time they’re born from urgency and ingenuity. I recently heard an anecdote that gives the flavour. A payroll specialist, wrestling with a tedious task, asked if their company could buy Python. They had asked Gemini how to solve the problem, and the model suggested Python. Taken at face value, it is a ’lack of context’ problem but it also reveals a powerful instinct: people will chase any tool that promises a quick fix, even if they don’t quite know what they’re asking for. That impulse — the creative scramble — is the heartbeat of Shadow IT. ...
On 26 August 2025 I found myself in a Wellington room buzzing with energy, ideas and a fair bit of scepticism. The AI Forum New Zealand had gathered four panel members to unpack both the promise and the puzzles of AI in Aotearoa. It made for a cracking afternoon. AI Forum NZ has long played the role of convener in New Zealand’s AI landscape. It pulls together industry, academia and government to accelerate AI adoption while keeping things responsible. Their latest Productivity Report set the backdrop for the discussion. The report is clear: AI can deliver significant productivity gains for New Zealand, but the challenges of governance, trust and skills still loom large. ...
Context for new readers: This document builds on my earlier blog about vibe coding an RFI where I explored whether a single “vibe coder” could respond to a government Request for Information (RFI) and even begin building the product. Here, I’ve reframed that exercise as a formal project brief, as if written by a product vendor. It also includes an architectural view to highlight what an internal team might consider. 1. Executive Brief (Senior Executive) Context: TEC seeks to add a CV and Cover Letter building capability to its Tahatū Career Navigator site. Purpose: Support learners to create tailored, professional documents integrated into the wider careers ecosystem. ...
Once upon a time, customer service meant walking into a building. If you needed to pay a bill, change a booking or renew your licence, you went to the branch down the road. Banks, shops, post offices, council offices — all ran on face-to-face chats and paper forms. It worked, but it came with queues, short hours, and a long drive if you lived out in the wop wops. Then came the phone. In the 80s and 90s, private companies jumped on 0800 numbers and central call centres so you did not have to show up in person. Government got on board too, but it was slower going. Often you still had to ring the right regional office, and sometimes that meant calling three different numbers. For private businesses, the phone was a way to win customers. For government, it was more about easing the pressure on the counter. ...
Sam Altman promised us fireworks. What we got was more like a damp sparkler on a windy Wellington night. GPT-5 was billed as the big leap toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a moment to remember. Instead, the release has left many users and experts wondering whether OpenAI has oversold the future and delivered… just another clever but incremental model. The Financial Times went straight for the jugular, suggesting GPT-5 might even be proof that AI has hit a plateau—progress slowing just when the hype cycle said it should be accelerating. Over at The Verge, early users were quick to call the model “underwhelming,” noting that while it’s faster and cleaner with code, it doesn’t feel revolutionary. ...
Why I did this: to test how far a single person can go from RFI → product using vibe coding + AI helpers. Edit — 27 Aug 2025 I’ve also expanded this experiment into a more formal vendor-style brief. You can read that follow-up here: Project Brief: TEC Tahatū CV & Cover Letter Builder (Vendor Simulation) TL;DR RFIs can look simple. The work is not. Vibe coding gets you ~80% (exploration, scaffolding, first drafts). The final 20% (debugging, infra, security, accessibility, export fidelity, compliance) still takes months, not weeks — but it’s months, not the year+ you might expect. Tooling friction is real: Copilot vs ChatGPT context split slowed me down. Would I build a production system solo? Yes — if the product has a broad market, not a single-customer (govt-only) dependency. A quick note on PM & architecture roles While I wore the hats of product manager and architect here, I want to acknowledge these are deep, strategic professions. They can make or break products. My sketches came quickly because I’ve spent time around these functions, but it’s not trivial. Respect to those crafts. ...
Maths as Language Maths is not numbers, it is a language. Precise, unforgiving, and beautiful in its clarity. English may forgive a typo; Te Reo may sing in nuance, but maths offers no such mercy. One wrong symbol, one shaky line, and the meaning vanishes. That is why it feels like the ultimate test for artificial intelligence. Can machines ever truly speak mathematics? Why Maths Is Harder Than Human Languages Human languages are messy, forgiving, alive. We understand words out of order. Slang shifts. We lean on tone and context. ...
MCP—or Model Context Protocol—is the latest open standard that’s supercharging AI agents by giving them a reliable, universal connection to tools, services, and data. Imagine AI as a savvy assistant… but one stuck in a room with no windows. Until now, every new tool—whether a database, file system, or API—needed a bespoke connection. MCP breaks those walls down. It gives AI the ability to speak a consistent “plug-and-play” language, no matter what it’s connecting to.1 ...
Summary “A new way of coding is emerging where AI writes most of the code and humans just guide the process — meet vibe coding.” Vibe coding is a buzzworthy approach to software development where developers (and even non-developers) describe what they want in natural language, and a Large Language Model (LLM) generates the code. Instead of meticulously crafting every line, humans focus on testing, tweaking, and guiding the AI’s output—letting the “vibes” steer the process. ...