Previously at the Volcano Base I’d been Waiting for Godbot. Since then I’ve been dashing about like a vole with a sweet sweet beetle. Nom.

I have, for some years now, been charging people quite a lot of money to tell them things they already suspected. Not in a psychic hotline sort of way. More in the "yes, your invoicing process really is eating 50 hours a month and here's exactly how much that's costing you" sort of way.

It's called a systems review. I interview the team, map out the processes, find the friction, do the maths, and produce a report that puts actual numbers on the vague sense of operational dread that keeps business owners up at night. The bit that surprises people most isn't the cost. It's the gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what the people doing the actual work know is happening. That gap, it turns out, is usually enormous and full of spreadsheets.

I charge at least £3,000 for this. And it's worth it, because what comes back is a genuine, specific, quantified picture of where your business is leaking time. Not a framework. Not a maturity model. A map of exactly where the days are going. I use it as the basis for very clever recommendations.

So naturally I've gone and made a DIY version you can buy for £75.

Something happened in the last few weeks that I don't think most people have clocked yet. The latest generation of AI models (Claude Opus 4.6, Codex 5.3) crossed a threshold. They didn't just get better at writing plausible sentences. They got good enough to carry structured professional reasoning, hold context across a long conversation, and produce output that I'd actually be comfortable putting my name on.

Which means we're now in the era of what I'd call personal software. Not apps. Not SaaS platforms with tiered pricing and a sales team. Software that one person builds, from their own expertise, that runs inside tools you already have. No login. No subscription. No "book a demo."

I find this genuinely exciting, which is uncomfortable for an idealistic skeptic.

I made an AI skill. A file you download and plug into Claude or Codex. It contains my entire systems review methodology: the interview framework, the diagnostic logic, the way I quantify operational friction in days and cash.

You have a conversation with it about how your business (or your clients’) runs. It asks the kinds of questions I ask, the ones that make you pause and say "actually, I've never thought about it like that." Then it does the analysis and produces a proper report: where the time is going, what it's costing, what to fix first.

Twenty minutes. No call. No waiting for the PDF. If you’re a fractional consultant-type, it’s like adding a tiny Phil to your team.

Here’s a sample report built from dummy staff interviews and a chat with a dummy MD.

Is it as good as hiring me? No. I'd be lying if I said it was. When I do this work with real clients, there are follow-up questions, reading between the lines, years of pattern-matching from similar organisations. The skill can't do all of that.

But it does about 80% of the job. And for most small businesses, 80% of a proper systems review is roughly 80% more than they've ever had.

This is new. I'm telling you lot first because you'll actually use it and tell me what's brilliant and what needs fixing. It's £75 and it's here.

The first 10 people to use the discount code SOFTY2026 at checkout get £25 off. I can’t decide if this is the height of idiocy or if it’s genius. If people like it, I’ll carve out other parts of my professional expertise and turn those into skills too.

Have a go. Break it if you can. And if it tells you something about your business (or that of your clients) you didn't expect, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.

Someone Built a LinkedIn/Epstein Crosschecker and Yes, It Works

A tool called EpsteIn (Epstein + LinkedIn, which is the kind of portmanteau that writes itself) lets you search your LinkedIn connections against names in the released Epstein files. Because apparently the professional networking hellscape wasn't quite unsettling enough.

404media.co | Worth a look if you enjoy that particular flavour of dread that comes from discovering your network is even worse than you thought.

An Open-Source App That Lets AI Read and Send Your Texts

OpenMessage is a local-first Google Messages client that gives AI assistants full read/write access to your SMS and RCS messages via MCP. It runs entirely on your machine, nothing touches the cloud, and it works with Claude Code and Cursor. Personal software, basically, built by one person.

openmessage.ai | Relevant if you've ever wanted your AI assistant to handle the tedious text replies you keep putting off. Also relevant to this week's theme of tools built by individuals, not companies.

A Visual Editor That Connects Your Browser to Your Coding Agent

Inspector lets you click on any element in your front-end, move it around visually, and have the changes written directly to your codebase by Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor. It's basically Figma for people who've already built the thing. Local, no setup, no cloud.

tryinspector.com | If you're building anything with AI coding tools, this bridges the gap between "it works" and "it looks right." Another example of the personal software trend in action.