Your first coding language: what's wrong with Python

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.

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.

Somewhere in my benchmark results sits a complete legal memorandum. Fifty-eight kilobytes of finished work: issues identified, analysis done,