First up, is Vertex AI Studio which I hadn’t heard of before.
Joining the StartupSchool gave me access to Google’s discord which is great. I needed to have more of a community
So the main paradigm shift is one going from how the user interacts with you/your business. Previously the user would navigate manually to find their information, but now Virtual Agents abstract away all the mundane manual searching, and they can lookup information and take action for you.
LLMs began as just being able to enter some text and we could get back a response as well generated words.
Then Retrieval Augmented Generation was born, and you could go and fetch structured data.
Invested an hour or so preparing sales comms for a really fun potential lead
Had several chats with probable co-founder
Helped a friend on his web problems for two hours
More time invested into attempting to get the DXP project working
Dealt with some admin
I’ve got a whole list of tools to testing and videos on. I’m fairly clear now that the opportunities with AI will be:
For services … helping others navigate through AI. A lot of people are very, very much in the dark about what’s going on beyond ChatGPT. And some haven’t even used ChatGPT yet. This comes in the form of:
Consultancy
Implementation
Training
As for scalable products, every day I see another AI startup website. I will eventually put these into more context, but I’m clear that the industry is moving so insanely fast because the infrastructure, money and human resources are there now. The internet rollout was slowish, but the AI boom is insanely fast.
So in terms of making scalable products it’s going to be about finding clear and specific problems in industries that AI can fix. Which is nothing new, it’s all about identifying and fixing problems. AI can just start fixing a lot more problems!
I do think medium/long term the personal assistant (AI will be super pervasive it won’t need to be stated) will follow everyone, learning about them, and it will help them navigate through life in ways we can’t possibly imagine; but for the ones that we can, it will mostly be about abstracting away the mundane, and protecting from information overload.
And that’s almost happening with Language Models right… but eventually i think we will have local models on our hardware especially with these quantum chips coming out… so what’s the future for ChatGPT income? Unknown.
It’s almost certain that Operating Systems will become far more AI driven, and then I just think that will take out a lot of markets. It will replace a whole lot of existing solutions just because its so flexible. Every market will be changed though.
Avatars.
The personal assistant will be founded on avatars and how wonderfully they are designed. Games will become really fun and perhaps not as linear as they used to. In one of my favourite games, Fallout New Vegas you can choose to set the charisma level of your char at the start … but now, your ability to persuade other characters within games can literally be down to the players own language. Which opens up to crazy amounts of potential.
After ten fairly strenuous days (keeping up with the AI industry taxes your brain!) today I felt like I need to manage my energy levels so I meditated in the garden for an hour and a half.
Life is a marathon. Listening to your body – which includes your mind – is crucial to not ending in burnout six months down the road. I’ve burnt-out several times in my career already but learning more about yourself through meditation can help a great deal.
Here’s the main reasons why it works for me:
I get my mind back. After a long haul of programming, researching and sorting other shit out the mind can be whirring around; and meditation just winds it down to zero and lets it settle there for a while. When it’s settled, it’s a nice place to be. It’s pretty much like rebooting a laptop and everything is well again.
I regain perspective. This game of life has lessons to learn far greater in importance than just getting business and money right. Meditation helps you reset your perspective.
I feel re-energised. If you do it properly you can recharge your energy levels. Combine stretching and breathwork (preferably outside) to look after your body. There’s a reason Yogic principles has lasted thousands of years.
Afterwards, with my mind reset, I can reassess clearly what needs to happen next.
I looked at all the things I’d done over last nine days
Made small breakthrough in DXP product
Thinking Big Forces Bigger Actions
Was chatting to a friend who is looking to raise an astronomical amount of money. It’s a ridiculous amount, and he get’s that, but what’s interesting is that big ideas force actions that you wouldn’t necessarily think of doing, if you didn’t think the big idea. So he had ended up emailing the President of the UAE. Which he wouldn’t have done if he had been thinking small.
Really cool lesson there.
Persistance
Made breakthrough in DXP product. My local system needed to have its docker containers manually deleted one at a time because they’d got all messed up. And then it worked out the box. Which was great. Lesson is to just keep on going, regardless of how frustrating it gets.
Once you’ve hit your 40s, you truly realise that actually health is wealth. It’s so easy to just think that earning money is the cure to all your problems and is the key to happiness. We are literally indoctrinated with it from birth.
In previous life chapters I burnt myself out many times. IT work is basically infinite if you choose it to be… and doing so will consume you. I’ve always said to newcomers to the industry that the easiest thing to do is to get a 9 -5 developer job and be happy with it. Take time off, relax, paid holidays, maternity, corporate benefits, sick pay, etc.
But self-employment is a much different game.
And part of that game is about making sure you look after yourself. I’ll post more about this in the future.
Today I woke up earlier than normal, did my exercise and then went to the library for my remote working space today. The main goal for today was getting my landing page up and running so I can get Stripe to verify that.
As i’ve said before… I’m getting the platform in place so that I can start building stuff on it, whatever I choose to do.
I’ve decided to begin my offerings as one which helps other navigate through the AI space but also leveraging all the dev experience I’ve already got. The next six months will be a steep learning curve as I catch up on concepts, tools, market choice and most importantly, practically implementing AI tools and building my own.
I’ll also need to start getting a team together. But that’s a side note for another time.
Point is, my offering is to help others navigate through their own AI transformation, together with any other web stuff they need (I’ve suddenly realised I quite like online marketing) and the ones who sign up to the monthly service will get lifetime access to all products I build for free.
Will this work?
Well, the value is in my consultancy plus development. That’s already proven over the last twenty years. The added value is helping them study their business within the context of AI transformation. Also, I’m thinking of a few ideas that can deliver more value like industry reports, a selection of the best YouTube videos on AI… and then the value on top will be the AI Platform that I want to build toward.
So what’s the end point on the AI Platform?
Essentially, AI Agents.
Everyone eventually will have their own AI Agent. How that works exactly I don’t know yet… but we will all have a ‘digital twin’ of some sort and this will abstract away a hell of a lot of things for us, and help us navigate through life more effectively.
They will know everything about us – hopefully as a standard this is all encrypted and private rather than hosted in the cloud. Because they have this context, they will be able to offer individual advice, provide reminders, etc, etc.
People will have AI agents… and companies will have them also. Buildings, cities, governments, etc. And then i’m sure a lot of the James Bond villains of the world envisage one overriding one that monitors and calls the shots… Aladdin anyone?
Use your imagination.
So that’s where I want to move towards. I am totally aware the big boys will be doing this already … but I’m fairly certain I can build something with my own twist to it, and if I build it, I’m sure as I keep going I may find a niche that it can fit into.
Tired today but wanted to get my thoughts down in a work diary.
WordPress is a really good platform.
I have recently been making a few websites in NextJS/React … and because you can get lots of wonderful react web block components, it was quite an attractive to develop with. But the problem for clients is that they would have to pay for Sanity integration, or pay me to update their websites. Which is OK if you want to earn a few hours here and there, but it’s not an effective way of doing things.
I forgot how good WordPress is. For some reason I became a typical developer snob of WordPress. But the ecosystem has seriously improved. I don’t know too many other CMS’ with the most recent being Statamic. I’ve had a glimpse at Sanity on React but that’s about it. Anyway, the point is, the ease of use of WordPress is probably unchallenged. It’s really easy to get up and running. I haven’t as yet done anything more than posts but I have enjoyed the writing experience. Everything just works as you want it to.
I don’t know why I went off it, I could have easily kept on making WordPress websites and made a lot of money doing them. Potentially even could have made my own WP template or plugins and made a ton of money. But I decided to move onto more complex software stuff, which is fine.
I wonder what CMS’, or indeed the internet will look like in 20 / 40 years. I may make it to 40 years but not much beyond that in all probability. At any rate, I will see a glimpse of the future. Will WordPress be around in 40 years? Well, as long people still want to publish content to the interweb, it probably will.
Anyway, the point is, WordPress is really good. It’s a great platform, and I can easily see, although I haven’t looked yet, AI plugins that just summarise your entire wordpress blog and let you query it. I may well build that just to see how easy it would be to integrate. Would be good to have my own WordPress plugin for that anyway.
Could also make a plugin that summarises a post, and then deploys it to all the social networks, rewriting it a bit, etc. Fairly obvious stuff but cool nonetheless.
Eerie Positive Reinforcement from ChatGPT
The other day I copied all of my posts and put them straight into ChatGPT. Here’s what it said:
Your blog reads like a mix between a tech founder’s diary, a strategic playbook, and an experimental lab for AI, marketing, and self-discipline. It’s got rawness, vision, and momentum—exactly what you need at this stage. The way you’re thinking about “Tactical Stress”, positioning, and AI-driven marketing is spot on.
That’s the first time, ChatGPT has given me positive reinforcement that actually felt real and genuine funnily enough. Unless ChatGPT is flattering me in some way, which I don’t think it could unless I asked it to.
Since I needed to get a landing page up for Stripe to verify before I could start using the account, I asked it to help me with my marketing landing page.
ChatGPT is good at tightening up marketing language, as long as you give it detailed context and your own starting point
AI / LLMs certainly raise the bar in work quality. I still believe the human element is essential. I sent an AI email yesterday and it felt wrong afterwards. There’s something non-genuine about it. Even though it was a tweaked version of my own.
Anyway, I showed it a version of my landing page. Remember that I had given it context of my entire blog so it had a vivid idea.
Where to Go from Here?
Your current website content is good but too broad—it sounds like a generic tech agency rather than a cutting-edge AI transformation hub. If you’re positioning yourself as an AI R&D pioneer, we need to refine your messaging to make it sharper, more compelling, and action-driven.
It then gave some ideas, so rather than second guessing I just implemented them. Of course, I still am doing this manually at this point
I’ve taken some screenshots of current work in progress for prosperity.
These are a really good starting point. Got a bit more to do.
Another day in the world of tech. When you see the amount of awesome software already out there, it’s kind of mind boggling. For instance, Tokyo are doing a digital twin of the city where real time data can be mapped over it
At some point all the cities will have their own real time engine – I guess this is what Smart Cities are all about. Not saying I totally agree with it but that’s for another day.
Today, setup a YouTube channel and did my first video on AI Upscaling (basically resizing an image with AI). It was a fairly basic video and I got the volume levels wrong but I enjoyed the process. I’m starting to realise that I can go into marketing a lot more because it’s quite enjoyable.
I also was working on configuration of Stripe, and realised I needed to get a website up and running to activate that. So I’ve uploaded something to kintronix.ai
Had an annoying production error with Vite where it hadn’t included a CSS file and took me a while to figure out what was going on.
And I sent my first sales letter out for the system.
I’m launching a Life & Work AI Assistant platform—a monthly subscription that effectively bolts an AI department onto your business.
Early adopters will get extra hours and help across their web projects and marketing but the main focus is providing value by taking the time to understand a customer’s business within the context of AI. Analysing:
How AI will impact your industry so you can stay ahead
Automating repetitive processes
AI Service Assistants on your site to supplement sales
Today a friend came up with such an awesome phrase that i’ve adopted it…
Tactical Stress!
Tactical Stress is putting genuine pressure on yourself by making a firm decision which is time delineated. A firm decision is basically when you’ve said ‘screw it’ – ‘screw the consequences, screw the challenge, screw the dangers … i’m doing it anyway.’
It also means you cut out the other options. When you have other options it means you can always retreat. You can always change your mind. That’s not a mindset that will produce optimum results.
I’ve started posting on LinkedIn every day for the last week. I’ve had a few people message me about it; and a few comments. I’ve barely used LinkedIn before now so I haven’t even got to the optimisation part yet. For me, it was about making that ‘public’ commitment to taking a path which helped put the tactical stress on me. And it’s a fun place to be right now.
However, I am under no illusions how challenging it is going to be competing in the industry from my situation. The players are already established and AI is an easy addition to existing functionality. Is it overhyped – yes and no. The tools coming out are a product of great imaginations, and I consider those part of AI. More on them in the future.
At the same time, I’ve got a lot of great people around me, i’m at a good experience and skill level; and I tend to think in an unorthodox way. I also know there’s no real true failure possible here. The only failure would be to not start – to not go through the AI transformation process myself. At the end of it, I will know a lot more about myself, and about the new paradigm. If I ‘succeed’ in some meaningful way, that’s just additional awesomeness.
And finally, the market is pretty damn big. I do think I will find some chink in the armour if I keep on going. I will find at least one opportunity and when that appears, I am 99% certain that having a platform ready to go – ready to adapt to that opportunity … is a good strategy going forward.
Incremental Progress On Building The Platform
I had some life things to do today but I managed to get some time in on my AI platform.
I still feel that the tried and tested beauty of the Laravel framework is a really solid choice to do that. Today I reminded myself of Policies, Tests, Mailables, Service Providers and Events. I configured a welcome email based on an email verification event, and it reminded me of how well thought out the framework is.
After sorting out the remainder of the Stripe integration, I will hook the system up to some different LLM APIs and I’m going to play around with local ones. At least at that point I will have a system which is somewhat of a basic ChatGPT clone… but I can build upon it.
Income, Grants & R&D Credits
The next major milestone is to finish configuration of Stripe since I have an idea which might get me customers onboard sooner rather than later. If I can bring some income in and delivered scaled value from the system to begin with, that’s going to be a big help.
I also need to bring daily research into grants into my reality. I’ve seen other people get grants relatively easily, so now that I’ve made my decision I will be able to find something. That, and R&D credits.
Decided against talking about the severe negative impacts of AI tools, opting to just do some iterative image generation. Some people don’t know what’s possible with AI tools yet, so thought I would write about them. Videos coming soon, but just this for now.
In work news – more conversations, and getting deployment configuration correct today.
Please draw me a beautiful image of a mountain, blue sky, sunshine, with some rivers. Maybe some animals.
now, as far as you can, take the same image and scene. and drop a nuclear bomb on it. draw it.
now imagine the same scene thirty years on after nuclear radiation has taken its toll
then fast forward 1000 years into the future. what happens?
I have no idea why it added another nuclear detonation in, but I liked the rest of it.
then zoom another 10,000 years into the future. what happens.
AI really is amazing for creating fantasy type scenes.
I was interested to see what would keep happening.
ok, once more push it one million years into the future.
"One million years later, Earth is a completely alien world. The mountains have eroded into bizarre landscapes, bioluminescent forests tower over glowing rivers, and strange new life forms dominate. The sky pulses with surreal colors, shaped by an atmosphere far removed from what we once knew. Human civilization is nothing more than a fossilized whisper beneath the surface. This is not our planet anymore—this is something new. Want to go even further into the abyss of time?"
Go further into time. Go to infinite minus one day. What does it look like?
This blew my mind when it came up.
Here it is—one day before infinity. Matter and energy swirl in an incomprehensible dance, reality itself breaking apart into fractal patterns of light and void. The concept of Earth, time, and space is long gone, replaced by an endless, shifting expanse of the unknowable. This is the last moment before the infinite, where the rules of existence dissolve into something beyond human understanding.
Want to take it one step further, into infinity itself?
Yes goto infinity.
now rewind to the beginning of time. and put a minotaur in there somewhere for fun.
Now imagine a world where the Minotaur was the first being, the god. what would it look like? change the style to ultra realistic
I loved this one, absolutely brilliant. Also love the little man on the mountain top that it added.
Here it is—the Minotaur God, the first being, shaping existence itself. A colossal divine force, its glowing veins pulse with cosmic energy, crafting labyrinthine mountains, golden plains, and rivers of molten light. Ancient civilizations kneel in reverence, carving temples into the cliffs as the sky swirls with celestial power. This is a world ruled by the Minotaur, where creation bends to its will.
I love that minotaur god. can you give him a wife?
It really is crazy how good it is at image generation. How does it really perform the process. Anyway I switched it up a bit.
ok, now take the minotaur and have him sitting down on a sun lounger next to a swimming pool whilst his children run around all crazy. he looks extremely fed up of parenting. the mother has drunk herself to a stupour and is about to slump into the pool. they have human servants.
now, fast forward 1000 years and add a twist of evil.
Love it. And I’m gonna leave it there. Try it out for yourself. Can be fun.
Currently there are three AI projects going on. Without giving too much away right now, I’ll call these:
KTX
DXP
SQA
KTX is my platform built in Laravel and I see it as a strong reliable backbone for everything I do going forward. I see it linking in with other AI services. It will serve the main web interface that eventually paying customers will be using.
Today’s main focus was on getting monthly subscriptions configured and setup along with Stripe integration. I’ve got this done but there’s plenty of QA, configuration and understanding I still want to do on it. But the basics are in place and eventually I will be able to take monthly payments from people. I kind of have an idea about what I can do with this in the short term.
DXP is a prebuilt platform that I am very grateful to have the opportunity to work with and help drive forward. Now’s not the time to delve too much into that, but past few days we’ve got it to a point where we can start taking it for a spin. A lot of it is around content generation, which is obviously highly competitive, but there’s quite a lot of good points to the platform and it would be naive to not investigate its potential.
Today I had a conversation about high level strategy around the DXP.
SQA is a potential third platform that a friend is prototyping using bolt.new and supabase. It’s amazing to see what no-code tools can output now. Time will tell how resilient the code is when it comes to actually being used by people but I can’t deny how cool it is to see something like bolt help someone with no programming experience helps get their ideas down into prototype form – not just UI, but actually functionality including Supabase.
Today I had a brief look at the progress on his prototype, and was amazed at how it was starting to come together.
Yes these tools help us make UIs faster, but are they just digging themselves into a hole faster? Time will tell. Programmers without AI are now at a huge disadvantage, and I know of one good friend who pretty much just directs an AI in everything now. But he has the experience and knowledge of how to structure an app, and WHY it is structured in such a way.
Anyway this is a conversation that’s going to drag on for a while. Many programmers will refuse to think AI is going to take their job, some will think it supplements their job, and others think it has fundamentally changed their job.
We can build UI and functionality far faster now … but it’s always been about making software that’s wonderful for humans to use. It’s about the design, not just aesthetically, but how the software itself is engineered to user flow. AI is the best pattern recognition tool out there, and it will recognise best practices; the good news is that humans will have intuition to point it in the right direction.
