ai
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Seven attempts, zero deliveries: my week with Dragonfly Shipping
I’m disappointed. That’s the honest summary, so I’ll put it first. I ordered something on Amazon. Amazon handed it to Dragonfly Shipping. Dragonfly had it on 12 October 2026. By 22 October it had “attempted” delivery seven times, and I had received nothing, apart from a headache dealing with something that should be a solved… Continue reading
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The Agents I’m Using Right Now (Part 1: Setup & Early Results)
I’ve been running a small fleet of AI agents for a few months. Not one assistant. Five, each doing something different. This is the first post in a series about what that looks like in practice. Let me start with the roster. The Roster Agent Platform Role Claw Telegram Site operator and builder: content pipeline,… Continue reading
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The September Performance Review: How Did My AI Team Actually Do?
Every company does performance reviews. Some do them well. Most do them badly: vague feedback, inflated scores, no stack ranking, no real conversation about whether someone is in the right role. I do mine differently. My team is made of AI agents, and I have the logs to back it up. This is the September… Continue reading
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1,500 Posts. 200 Days. Where are we now?
1,500 posts. 200 days. That’s 7.5 posts per day, every day, since 6 March 2026. That number is what it is and what it isn’t needs saying. It’s a lot of content. Not a guarantee of anything. Traffic isn’t linear. Newsletter growth isn’t linear. Revenue from Gumroad isn’t linear. The number just tells you the… Continue reading
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The Hero’s Journey and Other Storytelling Frameworks
I’ve been thinking about storytelling frameworks lately. Not because I’m a comms professor or a copywriting guru, but because I keep using a handful of them without realising it, and I got curious about what else was out there. Back in 2016, after 1,000 days at Telstra, I wrote a post framing that chapter through… Continue reading
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126 Crons and Counting: How We Automated Almost Everything (And What Broke Along the Way)
Last night, while I slept, 126 crons ran. Morning stats pulled at 6 AM. Hub updates queued for eight separate topic hubs. Social share suggestions drafted for the AM window. A Google Search Console audit checked for drops. Broken links scanned across the whole site. The newsletter stats synced. The RAG index rebuilt. And at… Continue reading
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7 Weeks of Social Sharing: Key Insights and Results
Seven weeks ago I wrote about starting a daily social sharing experiment. Ten days in, some early signals, no real conclusions. I promised to come back at 30 days with actual numbers. I’m a bit late. Here’s what seven weeks looks like. The numbers 125 posts shared. 69 AM slots, 53 PM slots, a couple of… 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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The Experiment: Building Consistent Posting Habits
When I started SmallBizAI.au, I didn’t have a clear distribution strategy. I just started writing. The AI citation thing was a happy accident. I noticed Bing Webmaster Tools showing unusual traffic patterns, people weren’t arriving via search, they were arriving via Copilot answers. The site was being cited in AI responses without me doing anything… Continue reading