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After assembling the robot and working through the debugging in Part 2, the moment finally came. Power on. Motors twitch. Antennas move. And then… a small cheerful “phew phew” whistle. Reachy didn’t speak words. But in that moment it absolutely felt like a greeting. Kia ora. The First Boot — Kia Ora Aotearoa The first time Reachy powered up properly it made a small whistle-like sound while its motors calibrated. It isn’t speech. It’s just a sound effect the robot makes as it wakes up. ...

Vibe coding is fun. It’s fast. It feels like magic. But unmanaged magic in a production environment? That’s how you get security gaps, compliance headaches, and a quiet email from the risk team asking for a “quick chat”. There’s a better way. For complimentary app development — dashboards, internal tools, workflow helpers, automation layers — managed vibe coding can dramatically increase output without increasing exposure. The trick is simple: structure the chaos. ...

Back to Part 1 — Reachy Mini Arrives in Aotearoa Sometimes a robot just refuses to cooperate. After spending seven months waiting for my Reachy Mini to arrive, I assembled it with care — and then watched it refuse to boot. Power LED: green. ACT LED: one sad blink, then nothing. No WiFi hotspot. USB-C ignored. The motors twitched promisingly, but that was it. My little desk robot was alive enough to taunt me, but too broken to respond. ...

There are two kinds of tech excitement. The day you order something… and the day it finally arrives. Between those two moments lives a strange ritual: refreshing tracking pages, checking emails, and convincing yourself the package has definitely moved since the last refresh. My Reachy Mini robot took seven months to travel from idea to desk. This post is Part 1 of a multipart story. Reachy Mini Diaries — The Kiwi Robotics Journey Part 1 — Waiting, Arrival, Assembly (this post) Part 2 — Debugging the Robot Part 3 — First Impressions Part 4 onwards — Building Things With Reachy The Order (July 2025 Optimism) In July 2025 I ordered a Reachy Mini, a small open-source desk robot created by Pollen Robotics in collaboration with Hugging Face. ...

For most of modern software history, documentation existed for one core reason: human written code was expensive to create and difficult to replace. Developers carried complex mental models in their heads. Code was the physical imprint of those models. Documentation was the act of extracting that fragile, human knowledge and making it reusable. Documentation existed to protect human intellectual property. That logic is breaking. With systems like OpenAI Codex and other AI coding agents producing usable code in minutes, the implementation itself is no longer the scarce asset. Code can be regenerated, rewritten, or discarded with very little cost. What remains hard, slow, and deeply human is deciding why a system exists, what it must guarantee, and where its limits lie. ...

Happy New Year. And yes — Happy New News. While most of us were still easing back into work mode, Ollama quietly shipped an update that lets Claude Code run against local models. Not Claude’s own models, to be clear, but local or self-hosted LLMs that speak the same API language. It’s one of those updates that looks small on the surface. A compatibility tweak. A few environment variables. Nothing flashy. ...

2025 wasn’t the year AI got smarter It was the year our thinking got exposed. By the end of 2025, most conversations had moved past: “Can AI do this?” To harder questions: “Should we trust this?” “Who owns this decision?” “What happens if this is wrong?” What surprised me wasn’t what AI could do. It was what it revealed about how people think when AI is in the room. ...

“We’ll just start using AI and see where it goes.” It’s a common and understandable reaction. AI is moving fast. Tools change every quarter. Vendors promise the world. So why slow things down by writing a strategy? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The earlier you are in your AI journey, the more you need a strategy — just not the kind you’re used to. Most leaders associate “strategy” with a fixed target state. Multi-year roadmaps. Detailed architecture diagrams. Commitments that age badly. ...

Imagine asking your policy system a simple question and getting a perfect answer in under a second. Now imagine asking it to analyse fifteen years of reports, submissions, evaluations, and operational metrics. One requires a chatbot. The other requires an engine. Policy teams often reach for RAG because it looks neat and tidy. A chatbot that can trawl internal guidance, regulatory texts, consultation documents and memos feels like a small miracle. And to be fair, a well-tuned Retrieval-Augmented Generation system is a brilliant librarian. It fetches the right paragraph, summarises dense text, and saves you from spelunking through document drives that haven’t been organised since John Key was in office. ...

When the tech world bursts into hype mode, valuations soar, promises multiply, and eventually someone asks: does this actually work? That’s the moment when hype meets the bubble. Artificial intelligence has reached that point — glowing headlines, soaring investments, and a rising hum of scepticism in the background. The thing is, hype isn’t all bad. It’s the spark that gets things moving. Every big leap — from the steam engine to the smartphone — started with an overexcited crowd shouting, this will change everything! And they weren’t entirely wrong. But the danger comes when excitement turns into blind belief. ...