Do coders need to learn to law?

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.

I passed Anthropic's Claude Certified Architect exam — maybe the first lawyer in Singapore to hold it — then wondered if I could even put it on my CV. It was hard because every answer was correct, and the gaps it found were my builder habits, not my knowledge.