Earlier this year I let 44 AI skills run most of my consulting business. Since then I have taken that setup apart and replaced it with a team of agents. My new setup is more secure and easier to use than ever. Yours can be too.

For thousands of years we have treated writing as proof of thinking. You could not produce a fluent, well-argued piece without doing some thinking along the way. That is no longer true.

This post is based on a workshop given on 24th September 2026 at design+AI.

Building a working prototype with AI is easy now: ask Claude to build you something cool and it will. Shipping that prototype, so that it is live and useful and does not fall over, is a different problem. On Thursday I spent a morning in Brighton with a room of designers and product people working through the practices engineers rely on to make that second part possible. We did not write any code ourselves. The agent did all of that. Our job is simply knowing what to ask for.

For a long time I have wanted to hand AI a senior job. When I was a CTO, this was the kind of work I would have delegated to a head of department: take a loosely described outcome, work out what it really needs, split it up, get other people to do the pieces, and come back with something finished while I got on with my own work.

That goal has been elusive for years. Until very recently, the best description of an AI model was an overeager junior. Delegating to one meant giving it lots of context, and then watching it closely. That was fine, but frustrating.

Donald Trump wants a better name for artificial intelligence. On Saturday he called the words inaccurate and very ineloquent, and asked his followers to vote between Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence and Supreme Intelligence. He is right that the name is wrong, and I have a better option than any of his three. I think we should call it Machine Intelligence.