A monster unleashed

I wrote a morning briefing skill for the Law Gazette and left out the part where you actually build it. Here it is with the building left in — pointed at a live legal database instead of an RSS feed, which changed the brief more than the change of source did.

Three camps argued about Claude's watermark in its first week, and each described a different imaginary object. Working out what it actually does turns out to be a decent test of what you think a language model is.

Legal data has meant win rates and disposition times — the machinery around the law, never what the law now says. So I baked Singapore's legal day into something you take in at a glance, and I'm still wondering what a glance can give you.

A group of lawyers decided their open-source legal AI needed a review committee, and made me one of its founding members. I can't write the code. I'm herding these cats anyway — for the rest of 2026.

In January I ranked how confident I was in each of five predictions. Six months in, that ranking is almost perfectly inverted — the two I was surest of are my worst calls, and the prediction I nearly waved away as too abstract became the story of the year.