The Banality of Evil

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.

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.

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.

A sharp CNA commentary argues AI can't replace lawyers. It's aiming a very good argument at old technology — and missing the real threat.