Hello, my imaginary friends

Title: Forgetting Was The Safety Valve
Duration: 10:46

After a Toastmasters meeting where he volunteered for a short speech and then had to set up the projector during the break, Simon drives home reflecting on his Claude setup. A helper agent checks file changes by hash rather than trusting timestamps, and a cheaper shell script yes/no check was suggested and implemented. He has deliberately left the scheduled jobs running, stopped answering the system's questions, and is watching token use as a baseline. His conclusion is that the new setup misses nothing and floods him with questions, where the old one let missed prompts quietly drop. He plans to rebuild slowly and optimise as he goes.

Title: Is Backing Your Club at a Toastmasters Contest Worth The Cost of Diesel?
Duration: 10:36

Simon starts on a cold walk in the woods, where he walks into a thorny bush. He then reports on his weekend. On Saturday he drove his wife and son to visit Winchester School of Art, a visit that helps narrow down his son's options. On Sunday he supported club members at a Toastmasters division contest, driving to Wales and back with a fellow club member and splitting the £52 diesel bill.

Title: Copilot Does the Weekly Report
Duration: 13:06

On Saturday 7 November 2026, Simon sets up a dashcam in his car and reports on his Claude usage. He cut it by two-thirds, until he mistakenly ran one of his old angels, which added a large spike, and he'll need to rebuild it. Instead of Claude, he used Microsoft Copilot on his phone and Mac to turn voice-memo notes, a transcript and a RAID log into his weekly PowerPoint report. He says it worked well and gave him more confidence in other AI tools.

Title: I did what Bernie said - Close the Claude App
Duration: 10:12

Walking along the canal for the free coffee he earns by hitting 7,000 steps four days a week, Simon works out why his Claude budget keeps draining. Inspired by Bernie (@topgold), he's closed the desktop Claude app and switched off every scheduled job except the inbox process. His theory is that the hourly inbox agent keeps waking topic agents on the heavier Sonnet model, and that each answer he gives in the open-questions log makes Dudley re-invoke sub-agents. He's now had token-usage reporting added to the activity log, so he can see which agents burn the most.

Title: Fifty Questions and a Budget Gone Up in Smoke
Duration: 16:26

Simon moved his scheduled agents onto a new setup, using up leftover Anthropic budget before it expired. All their reports now feed a single open-questions log, which Dudley, his orchestrating agent, processes. On Wednesday the log climbed past 50 questions, and overlapping topics and new due-date prompts made it worse. The questions also used about 12% of his monthly budget in a single day, so he's cutting job frequency and considering a cheaper model for the sub-agents. He wants the open questions down to zero and daily usage back under 5% of his monthly quota.

Title: Check Your Robot's Homework, Says Bernie
Duration: 15:30

After his friend Bernie (@topgold) shared a Markdown file of his AI course, Simon ran it through his personal Claude to find the most relevant lessons for his client-facing work. Claude highlighted his habit of keeping documents in his Obsidian vault and the course's advice on preparing for meetings. The central lesson was to check AI output against source material and a second AI, backed by a study showing consultants who trusted AI answers were far less likely to get correct answers on misleading data. Simon describes running one agent to draft his PowerPoint summaries and another to review them, and says his orchestrating agent, Dudley, catches mistakes the others made. He ends by noting that one client has blocked Claude, and that he keeps client information out of his Claude and stays in the loop on everything he shares.

Sm2n 2026-11-04 #audio365 (308/365) #naPodPoMo too many tokens

Title: The Conversation I Need to Have Tomorrow
Duration: 5:49

Simon walks home in the woods in the dark with his head torch on, after a bonus walk to fit in his steps. Clients' Wi-Fi blocks Claude, so he couldn't use his usual tool at the client's office, and they've chosen Copilot instead. He has moved his workflow onto a new agent setup, which has 25 open questions for him. He plans a difficult conversation with his team tomorrow, telling them they can do much better and need guidance. He ends by recommending atmospheric electronic music from a radio show for dark walks.

Title: A Retrospective With a Former Client
Duration: 3:02

Simon finishes a client meeting with an old client, a retrospective on a project he worked on for about a year before a three-month gap. His main learning is that he should call out clients when they look under-resourced, and be more audacious about that. He plans to apply the lesson to his new project straight away.

Title: Lots of New Voices in the Mega Feed
Duration: 1:28

Simon puts the bins out and listens to the NaPodPoMo mega feed, enjoying hearing lots of new voices he hasn't come across before. He notices that some people introduce themselves at the start and end of their episodes, and he recommends doing the same, so new listeners know who's speaking. He ends by saying he'll keep this one short.