Of Klaudius, Keanu and Kanban
It’s been a funny sort of week. Ticking over on the scoping activity for an ongoing exercise development task and continuing to build and experiment with my artificial adjutant in the margins. About seven weeks into the Claudius experiment, I’m continuing to learn about a whole range of unexpected areas.
A conversation about Search Engine Optimisation led, within 24 hours, to the creation of a website (this one) whose domain had been sitting waiting for a purpose for about a decade and whose shape I was able to lift wholesale from a friend who already had a site that I wanted to emulate. I’d had a forgotten idea pop back into my head while out running, dropped a voice note into my phone and then been presented with it for action or filing when I got to my desk. I’d even turned a few processes into formal, shareable skills and handed one off to a far more technically-inclined but differently-motivated collaborator. The learning curve has been steep, but it hasn’t felt particularly challenging.
A catch-up call with my key collaborator-in-automation this afternoon became another session of bouncing ideas and comparing notes. He’s a Kanban acolyte, and has made it one of the underpinning mechanics of his approach to developing agentic assistance and it’s mostly working well for him, keeping him on the straight and narrow of priorities and away from interesting distractions. It sounded useful, and I had the realisation that something significant had changed.
I’ve always been interested in ideas like Kanban, but not interested enough to go and spend time learning and applying them; a bit like information management, I understand the benefit, but taking the time to be that organised has always been just beyond my interest horizon. But as of this afternoon, that doesn’t matter. I’ve received a clutch of markdown files which should be enough to train Claudius in the rudiments of Kanban. He already does a very decent job of managing the information I ask him to, and now he might be able to apply some of the same rigour to enabling me to manage my time. No workshop, no homework, just a quick slug of data and some conversation about incorporating it into our current ways of working.
I had a vision of Neo on board the Nebuchadnezzar doing his combat training, becoming a master of jujitsu and kung fu in an instant. Then I watched the clip back and realised that actually, the learning was quick, but not instant; and still the vast upload of knowledge and skills was not quite enough to match Morpheus.
And so it was with us. The imagined outcome of my artificial adjutant evolving instantly to also become a robust chief of staff was not to be. Partly because, after seven weeks of coaching and correction, Claudius was able to point to the ways we’d already baked in much of what canonical Kanban aims to achieve. We added an additional learning function and imposed a bit of rigour on how we treat new tasks and ideas appearing in my Out Tray. Some tweaks, but no great change.
But then the second surprise landed. Because everything with LLMs is a conversation, I realised that I’d spent an hour or so being introduced to Kanban. Having expected to see the knowledge head straight into my digital, back-up brain without troubling the biological one, I found instead that I’d enjoyed an informal hour’s “Intro to Kanban” workshop, and then been able to take my little project home with me.