Week 04, 2026 - Pete Cohen

Portfolio

This week I really felt like I was living the portfolio career life that I’ve been striving towards for a long time. Everything feels like it’s firing on all cylinders with Vibrance being really busy with a diverse set of clients, as well as lots of ongoing and emerging opportunities in my independent consulting work. I’m ramping up my engagement with ECOH (which is the Employee and Community Ownership Hub) and getting more focused on the band. Some days it’s felt a bit like whiplash, working on four different things at once, but I really enjoy the diversity and that things feel like they’re flowing at the moment. It was especially good to be investing some time into the band.

Sending merch

One decision I made was to take the posting of Smith & Cohen merchandise back on rather than outsourcing it. I was initially concerned about the amount of time involved in packing and posting records, because you easily find an hour has passed by the time all is said and done in getting it packed and to the post office and back. But then, while I was in the flow of packing CDs and writing notes to people today, I realised that’s what it’s really all about and having the opportunity to connect directly with people who value our music enough to buy it is a really special and important thing to do.

Bed Bugs website

I used Claude Code to create a website for my daughter’s Bed Bugs merchandise business. As always, it was mind blowing how quickly and easily I could get to a decent result and it’s been interesting iterating on it with my daughter. Using voice transcription to talk to Claude Code made me realise that she just won’t know any different - that the way to create software is just to talk to the computer, see it instantly manifest, and then keep iterating and tweaking it to your heart’s content.

Clawdbot

I’ve said it several times in various contexts over the last week, but I feel something has fundamentally shifted in the last month with the arrival of Opus 4.5. Clawdbot seems to be the new thing on the scene and people are saying that it’s a game changer - as if Siri was actually smart and useful. I was playing around with it a bit and was getting the heebie jeebies when turning it off - as though it’s already a sentient being that might not like that, and may try to resist. I can only imagine what’s in the frontier labs at the moment. Makes me wonder what’s behind the constitution that Anthropic just released. It feels like some version of AGI could be imminent. I don’t say that wanting to be sensationalist, but I sense that something is going on. I always think about the Knowledge Navigator video that Apple released in the 80s and how amazing it is that they could imagine this world and how close we are coming to achieving it.

Streaks

I’ve been using the Streaks app, which I’ve had on my phone for years, to keep up my Morning Pages routine and these Week Notes. It’s an old trope that we’ve heard thousands of times - about how keeping up the rhythm and doing the work is what makes the difference. But it’s good to be feeling some flow.

Arylic LP10 AirPlay Streamer

One of the best things I’ve managed to achieve this summer is cleaning up my workspace and creating an area I can sit and write. To further enhance that, I just bought this device, which means I can stream and control music when I’m not at my main standing desk. It’s a real quality of life improvement and amazing what you can get these days for not very much money.