Talks
Talks and presentations I’ve given. The AI Productivity Gap — May 2026. A talk given to IT colleagues about how AI and productivity interact, and how we can adopt AI in useful ways.
Arthur's Blog
Recent content on Arthur's Blog
Latest posts
Three Patterns for Spec Driven Development
It’s everywhere. It’s the new hotness. If you’re not doing SDD are you even vibing dude? I first came across the idea from a software library with no code which describes a time conversion library as a markdown spec + test suite, in sufficient detail to allow a coding agent to implement it. My initial thought was that this seemed a cool idea, but not something that would scale.…
Claude Code - The Missing Manual
A guide on getting productive with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. This is an update to my original post from mid-2025, incorporating newer patterns around plugins, issue tracking, and skills. Installation You’ll need an either an API key or a Pro/Max subscription. On first start, claude will ask you which you want - I recommend the latter to avoid unmanaged costs. To use…
Synthetic Publics Will Fail Confidently
By chance I read two articles at a similar time that join up nicely. First an academic paper The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research , by Sean Westwood. 1 Westwood demonstrates that autonomous AI agents can complete surveys with a 99.8% pass rate on attention checks, logic puzzles, and other standard bot detection methods. His bot maintains a consistent…
Context Engineering for Claude Code
On Tuesday I did a talk to our internal AI group, along with talks by excellent colleagues, on Context Engineering. The very next day, Anthropic released a blog post on Effective harnesses for long-running agents and updated their prompting best practices guide . Note to Anthropic: please can you release relevant material the day before I do a talk rather than afterwards! I talked about managing…
Creating Claude Code Plugins
On Friday Simon Willison published a look at Jesse Vincent’s 1 Superpowers plugin for Claude You can read Simon’s and Jesse’s posts to see what this super cool plugin does, but I wanted to understand how to create a plugin and this is quick summary of my notes. First up, Jesse uses a complex structure with three repos: Marketplace Plugin Skills It’s setup this way to allow…
Shorts, June 2026
Trying out a new format this week. Instead of links, here’s some shorts. Too little for a post, too much for a link. This week we have Power variation in AI data centres Adopting new CLI tools Historical maps Power variation in AI data centres (Link requires registration and full article isn’t free, but there’s a massive preview which is all I have access to) A new to me issue…
Getting started with the Anthropic Cookbook and Marimo
The Anthropic Cookbook is an excellent resource for learning how to write LLM code and it’s continually being updated, most recently with example code for agents . The Cookbook comes as a set of Jupyter notebooks. I prefer Marimo to Jupyter, mainly because it supports reactive cell reloading i.e. if you change an earlier notebook cell that a later cell depends on, the chain of dependencies…
HEPI Report on AI in Higher Education
HEPI, a UK higher ed thinktank, released the results from their 2025 survey of AI use by students. There’s a lot in the report, so here’s a few quick highlights. The big headline is that basically all students are using genAI: In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some…
Links, 4th June 2025
This week we have drones in Ukraine and SpaceX’s totally-not-a-cock rocket. The use of drones in Ukraine is advancing the state of the art very, very rapidly. First we had drones trailing fibre optic cables to avoid jamming, now there’s drones that navigate via camera and landmarks and, very shortly, autonomous kill decisions: IEEE Spectrum - Ukraine’s Killer Drones A very hot…
Another look at per token energy costs
Piotr Mazurek and Felix Gabriel have an amazing post up on LLM Inference Economics from First Principles , which I found on Bluesky. They go into a huge amount of detail about how inference works and how that affects processing speed. But I saw the graph above and thought “we can get energy from that”. And so I asked chatgpt-o3: “Looking at these graphs of throughput at different…
Claude Code - The Missing Manual
Note: This post has been replaced by Claude Code - The Missing Manual , which includes updated patterns around plugins, issue tracking, and skills. Notes that I wrote for work on how to get started with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic code tool. Anthropic’s own documentation is good, but I wanted a single page that I could share with people to help them get rapidly up to speed. Once past…
Links, 16 May 2025
A very late set of weekly links! This time it’s heavy on AI and it’s impact on research and teaching. Plus cyborg cicadas. First up: A NYMag article on LLM use at Universities went viral (at least in my education and AI heavy feeds!) last week. So that’s not the link as you’ve probably already read it. Instead, here’s Benjamin Breen on how AI makes the Humanities more…
Tokens, tokens everywhere
We have some actual numbers on tokens! In their commentary on the latest earnings report , Microsoft report: We processed over 100 trillion tokens this quarter, up 5X year-over-year – including a record 50 trillion tokens last month alone So we’ve got a baseline, and can estimate a growth rate. Assuming exponential growth and a three month token split of 19/31/50 we get 62% month on month…
Environmental Impact of AI
As Andy Massick explains well , if you are making a few requests per day to a simple non-reasoning text based AI model the carbon impact is, to use a technical term, bugger all 1 . I probably ask ChatGPT and Claude around 8 questions a day on average. Over the course of a year of using them, this uses up the same energy as running a single space heater in my room for 2 hours in total. Not 2 hours…
Links, 30 April 2025
Finally a week with more than two links! Beatrice de Graaf is a Professor at Utrecht University. Her talk at Stanford on The Quest for a Third Rome describes using text mining techniques to analyse Putin’s speeches since 1999. The paper, written with her student Neils Drost, is open access: Putin and the Third Rome:: Imperial-Eschatological Motives as a Usable Past “ In this corpus, we…
Links, 22 April 2025
Some AI development resources this week… How to Build an AI Code Agent Thorsten Ball has published how to build your own AI code agent . He creates a toy example in Rust that’s <400 lines but still includes tool use. Geoffrey Huntley does the same . It’s worth reading both Claude Code Best Practices Anthropic has released a detailed guide on Claude Code best practices . Of note:…
Links, 15 April 2025
Two links this week… AI Logos Are All Buttholes In what might be the most important visual design analysis of 2025, Velvet Shark has compiled a gallery of AI company logos that look like buttholes . From Claude’s spiral to Midjourney’s abstract void, it seems AI branding has converged on a rather unfortunate design pattern. If It’s Crypto, It’s Not Money Laundering…
Links, 11 April 2025
I’m trying not to be perfectionist about this blogging thing, and concentrate on getting stuff out so in that spirit so this week there’s just a few links, all on AI. First up - how to use AI. I see so many people type some random question into ChatGPT/Claude, get a mediocre answer back and move on. But how to get good results from these systems is not at all obvious. For a complex…
Connecting Claude Desktop to Zapier
Today’s fun is setting up the new Zapier MCP integration . This creates a MCP server that allows Claude Desktop or Cursor or anything else that supports MCP to call any Zaps Setting Up Zapier MCP Step 1: Install mcp-remote First, install the mcp-remote package using npm: npm install mcp-remote Step 2: Configure MCP Endpoint in Claude Desktop In Claude Desktop, you’ll need to add the…
Links, 31 March 2025
Trying something new, with a weekly-ish list of links 1) OAPs are radicalised too When Grandpa Turns Extremist: Digital Immigrants, Radicalisation and the German Reich Citizens Movement the radicalisation of middle-aged and elderly people remains largely overlooked despite their active involvement in nearly all extremist movements. This Insight advocates for a more nuanced understanding of…
Model Context Protocol 101
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model…
Experimenting with OpenAI's Deep Research
Now Deep Research is available to ChatGPT users on the £20/mth tier, I’ve had a chance to experiment. The tl;dr is that it’s really very good, and the level of progress in just 6 months is mind-blowing. I picked something I know about - financial pressures facing UK Universities. First, I asked ChatGPT to generate the prompt for Deep Research, using this template I found via a mailing…
About
Welcome to my blog! I’m Arthur This blog was started in 2000ish when the domain was registered, but over the years it’s moved around and been restarted many times, so there’s no back catalogue While this blog covers a lot about AI all the text here is written by me. I may use AI to check spelling and grammer. Or may not, as the multiple typos that no doubt still exist attest