AI versus Marshy 77 - what’s been rattling through my brain the last 10 years

with a side of shipping updates

Hey readers,

I think I’m getting some voice back.

I feel motivated to keep sharing, and while a good writer just writes, it feels good to know I have a lot more to say and an outlet I’ve been chipping away at that I own.

A couple of editions ago I opined on what’s happening to the working life as I know it because I can see what’s coming and know there isn’t room for how the present world is thinking about things.

I’m a proverbial canary in the coal mine - my dusty beak padding into the darkness, and while I don’t think I’ll die from gas exposure - I’m certain that just about anything could be waiting for us in that darkness.

Existenial threats.

Abundance the world has never seen.

A black swan that eats the canary.

…

Or maybe a financial crash to end all crashes and some sort of twisted evolution of capitalism as we know it.

But something I learned through all of the personal development and inner work I’ve done over the years is focus on what you can control.

So I’m punching out my words.

Fable 5 came out a while ago with a lot of fanfare - and before I had an opportunity to play with it properly - was whisked away again.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up - it’s Anthropic’s (current leader in the AI monetisation arms race) flagship model and can do some quite unhinged things - that’s what the Gen Z kids say when it’s cracked right?

I’ve given it a real flex and built…

a home assistant for Georgie

Helping her track things, her lists, how her brain works, our family calendar, and adapting to any changes she asks for and escalating things to me if it gets stuck.

It built it from a “brief” G wrote while we were mucking around with OpenClaw.

The funny thing is the tech just works better now.

OpenClaw mania peaked in March 2026 - just 4 months ago, and this is the SLOWEST things are going to go from here on in.

It’s legitimately crazy.

“This app is great!” -my spouse

One of the funny things it did was ping my Telegram Georgie’s product feedback on the home assistant.

So I went and told my tooling she wanted this fixed.

It shared that was simply a smoke test - she hadn’t used it yet but great to see the feedback pipeline working.

There was legitimate product feedback tonight and I told it to action it (add screenshot functionality - it did).

Then I told it to let Georgie know, it let me know it had already put that update in her inbox.

the anticipation stuff is what does my head in these days

a new website for our startup

I’m co-founder of a business called GradEngage.

We solve a very niche problem in the graduate recruitment space, the team is elite, and we’re moving as fast as we can with the limited resources we all have with our other commitments.

The original website was slapped together by our founder and a graphic designer in WordPress on the cheap.

It isn’t very good.

And hasn’t needed to be as we’ve focused on the early product, validation conversations, building sales pipeline, and closing our first pilot customers.

But you know - we’re running larger motions now to buckets of customers at once so we wanted to update it.

We’ve been building much more sophisticated things with the product and code - so we told it to update the homepage (WordPress) in look/feel presence of our more updated stuff.

Bang.

Fixed.

still in staging but will ship soon

a new voice assistant for my set up

Something that’s bugged the shit out of me is not being able to do all of the things I can do in my set up from my car while driving.

I can talk to vanilla Claude (or OpenAI back in the day) from the app, but this is not the same thing.

I have my coding set up running from a virtual server that’s connected to “all the main things” - so if I think of a note, want to know what I’m meant to be doing next, adapting my campaigns for new recruiting clients or much more - I run it from code.

Up until now I haven’t been able to operate that on the move - then Fable built a voice assistant (protected of course) that let’s me do the things.

that seems like light years ago

And that’s not even the thing I wanted to write about tonight.

I went ahead and asked it to review nearly everything I’ve written to myself over the last 10 years and identify and blind-spots I might have in relation to my working life.

It didn’t hold back.

• money moves nothing when spent on information and moves everything when spent on structure

It cited the volume and value amount of courses I’d bought over time and then contrasted it with my experiences with delegation and therapy - the latter is infinitely more effectice.

• my body tended to “feel” bad shit going down before I realised

dated stomach and eczema responses to things happening before job and life challenges.

• most of my ventures in business have had the same energising activity but have been completely at odds with being stuck on delivery

it’s own words:

The energizer list is *identical* for ten years: “Writing, speaking with
people, teaching, collaborating, presenting” (2018) = “Pitching. A deadline
with high stakes. Presenting.” (2022) = the hunt, coffees, going deep with a
client (2026). The drain list is equally stable: implementation grunt work
(2016), servicing/firefighting (2018), admin (every year). Yet every venture
ends up loading Luke with delivery — “I’m very reliant on myself to do all of the delivery” (2024). He sells implementation and treats the energizers as marketing overhead. **Improvement: invert it. The billable product should be the talking/teaching/strategy layer; any offer where Luke personally does implementation is mis-designed by his own decade of data.**

Fable 5

Bloody hell get out of my head Charles.

There was more of course, and talking it through with Georgie she hastened to point its just fancy pattern recognition.

Anyway - that’s enough of what’s been rattling through my brain.

-Marshy

p.s. boys and I went for a short run this week from our new pad. It’s foggy yet unforgettable <3

fogs going on