Have we all become tech fetishists now?

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.

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.

The meter that rugpulled my contract tool prices compute, not trust. That's exactly why the lawyer who can build it and vouch for it just got more valuable

Three days into scoring a legal benchmark, my tokens ran out. The fix wasn't a bigger budget or a better model — it was a different shape. On orchestration, loops, and reaching the frontier of what AI can do without a frontier budget.