April 2026

• May 5, 2026
• 5 minutes reading time

The Vibe

The good vibes are probably due to my health. I'm feeling good - much better than before. At the start of the year, I got put on statins, and while they had a great effect on my cholesterol, I'm one of those people who reacts to them poorly. Since coming off those, I feel a lot better. It probably wasn't something I noticed at the time, but there was definitely a gradual degradation in my energy levels.

That's also been helped by the weekly rides into work. Adding a minimum of 35 kilometres of cycling into my week has had a good effect – probably more on my mental state than physical, to be honest. The last couple of rides I've used the ebike functionality a lot less, basically pedalling in on the lowest levels of assistance and most of the way home as well, only switching to full assist to get up The Hill. I've also changed my route a little and am now going to and from work the same way – down Shepherd's Hill on the mountain bike trails, and the same loop back up on the return. It's a more direct route home and I don't have to navigate the back streets or main roads. We've switched back to standard time, so I can feel the days shortening. I need to leave a little earlier on ride days, otherwise I end up in the dark.

From the work front, things are kicking in. The new team is coming together, but we're mostly just getting to know each other at this point – I'm keeping it organic rather than pushing hard. At the same time, I'm starting to see some of the future work on the horizon, and be involved in some of that planning for that has been good.

I've also had more time to do my own thing. I pushed a couple of posts about Bloom'sI put together some resources to share with colleagues, and put out a call for feedback, which I've now received. So the next step is to pull all of that together and work out the best way to get it out into the world.

The other side project I've finally pulled my finger out and made progress on is a portfolio site. I've been going back through my career and pulling together a fairly substantial collection of projects, events, presentations, and initiatives. It's been good to reminisce about some of the happier times, career-wise. What strikes me is how much more open and outward-facing that work was. Since moving to Adelaide, a lot of my work has been institutional and inward-looking, and then COVID made that even more the case. Looking at it all in totality, that seems to be an anomaly and while it hasn't gone back to where it was things have improved. It's got me thinking about what the next challenges and areas I want to get into actually are.

One other thing this month: I've been properly exploring AI tools in a more considered way. Generative AI hasn't interested me much — generating content isn't something I want to hand off to anyone else, it's something I actually enjoy. But a lot of my work is scattered across different file systems, cloud storage, and file types, so using AI tools to handle some administrative tasks has been eye-opening. What I've found genuinely useful is feeding documentation from past projects into a large language model and getting back something I can edit, rather than spending hours writing it from scratch. Because the original words were mine, the end result still feels like me. The editing process smooths over the rough edges, and it still reads the way I'd write it.

I've also had a few "I wonder if this is possible" moments. One was taking a folder of Markdown files and asking whether a network graph could be generated from the front matter. Within five or six prompts, I had a usable prototype. It's not production-ready, but seeing that ability to quickly get to an MVP or proof of concept is genuinely powerful. It's an augmentation tool more than anything else – I can write scripts and code, but getting something to work would take hours or days. Being able to iterate quickly toward something refined suits the way I like to work.

I've focused almost entirely on Claude, mainly because the interactions feel more grown-up. The few times I've tried ChatGPT, it's felt like talking to a teenager – verbose responses full of emojis and saccharine verbiage, which is off-putting. I've also been reading a lot of Doug Belshaw's work on what he's been making with AI tools, which has been useful context. My use of these tools differs from what the AI companies are predicting, and it hasn't changed my view on the over-emphatic "this is going to change the world" outlook. I see a niche for the technology, but that's about it. A lot of what I'm actually doing is getting it to write bash scripts, run grep commands, manipulate files, and do the kind of administrative work that's tedious rather than meaningful. That's where it earns its keep.

Events

Had a couple of nice meals out - Sri Lankan at Taprobane, pizza at One Sneaky Cheetah, hot chips at Chicken Chef and Mexican at Que Onda Wey. Niece and sister-in-law came to Adelaide and spent a week over the holidays, which was nice. Ms A went over to spend time with Nanna and mum came back and hung out with us for a few more days. I took time off from work to hang out – so we ended up just going to nice places to eat and drink.

Photos

Watched

Finished Paradise — can't say I'm thrilled with the second season. Watched it mainly to see where the story arc went, not sure I'll go back for more. Currently watching the second season of The Pitt. We also had a couple of movie nights as a family and watched The Prestige and Hot Fuzz, which was great fun.

Listened

The podcast Everything is Fake by Jamie Bartlett was really good. I'd like to go back and re-listen to the whole thing in one go — I was following it week to week, and the threaded narrative across episodes would work better heard in sequence. It pulls together a lot of threads that have been on my radar — kayfabe, AI, and how those ideas connect.

• Tim Klapdor
• Adelaide, Australia
• posts&Reflection