Signal Over Noise #15 August 15th, 2025 Dear Reader, Well it’s been a week since release and everyone’s still talking about ChatGPT-5. Most can’t access it, and those who can have mixed reviews at best. The GPT-5 rollout on August 7th was supposed to be transformative, but it’s turned into a masterclass in why chasing the latest model is the wrong strategy entirely. So in this issue, let’s talk about what actually happened, why OpenAI is scrambling to fix it, and why your prompting framework...
6 days ago • 5 min read
Signal Over Noise #14 August 8th, 2025 Dear Reader, Back in April, I told you the AI tool landscape was a mess and gave you a simple framework: pick one core assistant, add research tools, maybe some workflow apps. Some months later, I’m still using that framework, but my actual daily stack looks completely different than what I recommended, and it changes depending on context (at my desk, out and about etc.) Here’s what I’ve learned after months of real-world testing, and what’s actually...
13 days ago • 4 min read
Signal Over Noise #13 August 1st, 2025 Dear Reader, I came across this meme on social media this week: “The dumbest person you know is being told ‘You’re absolutely right!’ by ChatGPT.” Source: X/Twitter So maybe now’s a good time to talk about AI sycophancy. Mostly because I constantly get that yes-man behaviour from my AI assistant(s), and despite constantly reminding it not to do it, it keeps happening. Chances are, it's happening to you too. The Pattern You’ve Probably Noticed Here’s what...
20 days ago • 4 min read
Signal Over Noise #12 July 25th, 2025 Dear Reader, Last week, a reader got in touch with some feedback that gave me pause: “Your newsletter last week felt a little ‘ChatGPT-y’,” they said. And yeah. They were absolutely right. It’s no secret that I like to experiment widely with various AI tools (also - that’s the whole point of this newsletter) but in the process, I’d let the machine’s voice creep in where mine should have been. So this week, let’s get into how to spot AI-generated text -...
27 days ago • 6 min read
Signal Over Noise #11 July 18th, 2025 Dear Reader, Browsers Are Getting Smarter I’ve been testing web browsers that can now book hotels, fill forms, and chat with PDFs. It’s making me rethink what browsers are actually for. Remember when browsers just showed you web pages? Those days are ending. I’ve spent the last week doing early testing on two browsers - Dia from The Browser Company, and Comet from Perplexity that treat AI as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought. Let's get to it....
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Signal Over Noise #10 July 11th, 2025 Dear Reader, Earlier this week a friend sent me a message that got me thinking. He’d been testing out a custom GPT I built months ago called Prompto - a structured prompt builder that forces you to break down what you’re actually trying to accomplish before throwing it at an AI. He was working on a CMS selection project for a client, comparing three to four different options and weighing up the pros and cons. Prompt is a free tool designed to take simple...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Signal Over Noise #09 July 4th, 2025 Dear Reader, In a tech world obsessed with frameworks, best practices, and shipping at scale, it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re allowed to build things just because you want to. You don’t need to be a software engineer with a five-year plan. You don’t even need to know exactly what you’re doing - you just need to care enough to have a go at it. This is the spirit behind vibe coding - a term that no doubt you’ve seen bubbling up in creative tech...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Signal Over Noise #08 June 27th, 2025 This week's newsletter originally appeared as an opinion piece on Medium.com earlier this week. Dear Reader, Every "zero effort AI" promise is a lie, and believing it is making us worse at our jobs. Artificial intelligence is being sold as magic: a push-button solution that eliminates work and thinking. The market is flooded with tools promising "zero effort," as if effort were the enemy of progress. But this narrative isn't just misleading, it's...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Signal Over Noise #07 June 20th, 2025 This Week: How to Build AI Assistants That Actually Work for You Dear Reader, Last week, I introduced the PAST Framework, a simple structure to help you write better prompts and get clearer, more useful responses from tools like ChatGPT. But what if you’re ready to go beyond just writing prompts? PAST gets you better responses, but what about when you need the same task done dozens of times? That’s where this week’s framework comes in - SHAPE - your...
2 months ago • 4 min read