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1337 Posts FTW!
SmallBizAI.au hit 1,337 posts today. If you know, you know. 1337 is leet speak. The hacker number. The one you hit when you’ve been at something long enough that the universe decides to reward you with a nerdy milestone instead of a round one. I’ll take it. I’ve been running SmallBizAI.au since March 2026, AI… Continue reading
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My Love Letter to Code Snippets in WordPress
In June 2012, an Australian developer named Shea Bunge got annoyed at their web host. It wouldn’t let them edit their theme files directly. So they built a plugin to work around it: a simple interface for adding PHP to WordPress without touching functions.php. They called it Code Snippets. Each snippet gets a name, a toggle, and a text… Continue reading
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I Spent a Weekend Archiving 23 Years of My Digital Life. Here’s What I Found.
1/ Why My digital memory is scattered across platforms I don’t fully control. Posts, tweets, connections, and half-finished drafts spread across twenty-three years of being online as a tech person in Australia, and some of it is already gone. I started blogging in May 2003 on Radio UserLand, back when blogging was still a weird… Continue reading
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Why I Wrote a Book on Building An AI Team
For months I kept getting the same question. In replies. In texts. Over coffee with people who’d read the site or seen a post somewhere. “This AI team stuff sounds great, but how do I actually set it up for my business?” I answered it in posts, in threads, in one-on-ones over a coffee. Eventually… Continue reading
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I Built My Daughter an SMS Bot to Sell Her Car
Emma is moving to London next week. She finished her Masters of Data Science, joined AWS, built her career. Now she’s off. London, new job, new chapter. We’re proud of her. Before she goes, she needs to sell her car. A 2014 Fiat 500c, light blue, convertible. Emma’s brief: put a sign on the car… Continue reading
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My AI Team Makes Mistakes. Here’s What I Do About It.
I have four adult kids. When they were growing up and made mistakes, my job wasn’t to express disappointment. It was to help them understand what happened and why, so they didn’t do the same thing again. Same deal when I was leading teams at Microsoft, Telstra, AWS. Someone makes a mess with a customer,… Continue reading
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Ranking AI Assistants: Who Gets Frank Arrigo Right?
A few weeks ago I ran an experiment asking how well various AI models knew me and the results were interesting. The short answer: GPT had me frozen in 2010, Gemini invented an IBM job I never had, and DeepSeek thought I was a football coach at the University of Detroit. I’ve also been running SmallBizAI.au, which… Continue reading
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When Your AI Agents Forget The Time
At 7am on Saturday, July 11, our AI editor sent a CRITICAL alert. Thirty-nine posts scheduled outside the 9am–noon Melbourne window. Midnight batches. Posts at 1am, 2am. The queue was apparently in pieces. It wasn’t. Every one of those 39 posts was correctly scheduled in a valid morning slot. The editor was reading UTC timestamps… Continue reading
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Wave 3 Launch: New AI Prompt Packs and Industry Insights
Wave 3 is live. Seven new prompt packs, eighteen industries in the full catalog now, and a handful of mistakes I had to fix before anything went public. This post covers how I choose industries, how the publishing machine works, what went wrong, and where things go from here. If you missed the origin story, the first post… Continue reading
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I Accidentally Built a Loop. Hundreds of Posts. One Very Long Hour.
Everyone’s talking about AI agents getting stuck in infinite loops. Turns out you don’t need agents. Two IFTTT recipes will do it. Here’s what I had running: Recipe 1:When I post to X → create a WordPress post Recipe 2:When I publish to WordPress → post to X Both made sense on their own. Both… Continue reading