Ben Phillips

Work in progress

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I miss seeing unfinished docs. Placeholder text, headings with no body, unanswered questions, bullet point lists that haven’t been fleshed out. Getting a glimpse into the thought process, the prioritisation. What’s important and what’s difficult.

Docs that were never really finished. They were living, they bore the imprint of previous meetings, betrayed changes in ways of thinking and exposed when new ideas were shared. Notes pasted in a different font, the fingerprints of time and thinking, of attention.

Pausing 'ship every week'

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pausing ship every week for a bit. I don’t know how long for. I’m kicking off a couple of new ventures, and I’m also doing some work for Rootcause.

I’m still building new things every week that are useful to me. I’d love to share how I built my personal knowledge base, distill, which ingests all my personal communications and provides me with a morning briefing, a life coach, and a chief of staff.

The Transition

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over half the world says AI makes them nervous. And a similar number think AI will bring more benefits than drawbacks. We’re optimistic, but scared. We can see some kind of upside but we don’t know how we fit. This is the Transition – we’re moving from our pre-AI world to a world that needs fewer of us to do the same work.

Six years ago, AI was still mostly theoretical for the rest of us. Junior engineers were starting careers assuming they’d still be writing code in 30 years.

WhatsApp Transcriber

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Voice notes are great for the sender. They’re not great for me. I read quickly and struggle to concentrate on recorded voices. I can’t listen to most podcasts. But I understand why people send them, so I built something to transcribe them automatically.

It uses Deepgram to transcribe incoming voice notes and sends the text back to me in WhatsApp. I had the idea, and 45 minutes later the app was live in a Docker container on my home server. Fifteen minutes after that, a friend pointed out WhatsApp already had the feature. I archived the repo.

Countdown

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to miss appointments and meetings. Without coping mechanisms I’d look at my calendar, see a meeting in 20 minutes, start on a small task, then look up to see the meeting started half an hour ago.

I suffer from time blindness, an inability to accurately perceive how much time is passing. I’ve been building workarounds since university – terminal reminders, physical alarm clocks, multiple alerts on my computer and phone, and checking my calendar far too often. It’s anxiety-inducing and I never fully appreciated how much I had to do just to get to things on time.

52!

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s pretty much guaranteed that no two decks of cards have been shuffled randomly in the same order on earth before.

Our intuition stops working past a certain scale. We can’t really grasp how big these numbers are.

The total number of permutations of a deck of cards is \(52!\)

\(8 \times 10^{67}\)

80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

One way of trying to feel the size of this number is to do the following:

Imagine you’re standing on earth. Wait a billion years. Then take a step. Wait another billion years. Then take another step. Do that until you’ve walked around the world. Then take a drop of water out of the Pacific Ocean. Then walk around the world again, waiting a billion years in between each step, and take another drop of water out of the Pacific Ocean. Keep doing this until you’ve emptied the Pacific Ocean. Then put a sheet of paper on the floor. Refill the ocean and do the same thing again, each time waiting a billion years in between each step, and when you empty the Pacific Ocean again add another sheet of paper to the pile. When the pile of papers reach the sun… burn the stack of paper and start again… doing the whole thing 1,000 times.

Project Costs Tracker

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building more software that actually gets into production means more tracking of costs. LLM usage in the product introduces a variable cost as you’re charged per token - unforeseen usage through bugs or user behavior can lead to a much higher bill.

Tracking this across multiple projects becomes harder. This week I built a dashboard that tracks what I’m spending.

I was going to open source this, but it’s probably easier for somebody to rebuild it than for me to audit the code fully! It’s not that exciting technically, but was a breeze to build with an LLM. I described where I’m spending money, it researched the APIs and built it for me.

The Cat Screen

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every morning, an e-ink screen in our kitchen shows a new cat scene that reflects what’s happening that day. It’s based on an original project I’ve wanted to build for my partner for a while, and it’s one of the most fun things I’ve worked on in a long time.

I expanded on the original by integrating our calendar into the image. On days Liverpool are playing, a mouse in a footy top appears in the scene. On special events such as Valentine’s Day or Christmas, the scene represents them accordingly. Seeing a new image every morning is a great ongoing experience. I’d highly recommend making something like this.

Packd

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ask any parent about keeping up with school communications, and they’ll tell you it’s a full-time job.

We’ve missed events buried at the bottom of emails in the past, and nearly sent Elvis in the wrong coloured socks for “wear red socks” day. So I built Packd, which reads the school emails and pulls out all events and deadlines.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but in my head it was a huge project where you could ask a chatbot questions, and mark actions as complete.

Multitasking is back in fashion

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Time tracking doesn’t work so well any more, at least how I used to do it. You’d set your tracker to a certain project, work on that for a period of time, then move to the next one.

Now I’ve got four projects on the go at once, Claude Code sessions pinging me when they need my assistance.

Time tracking apps need to embrace multitasking in the same way I used to try to eliminate it!

My weekly goals on a Samsung Frame

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a Samsung Frame in my home office. It sometimes shows pictures of my family, sometimes the cricket, sometimes it’s off.

I write my weekly goals in a doc on my computer. Like a lot of notes, they can become invisible when not in my line of sight. I’ve been considering getting a whiteboard to write them on, but I don’t have nice handwriting, I want my goals when I’m travelling, and I don’t want the extra step of copying my goals from a file to a whiteboard.

I'm going to ship one thing a week

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update, April 2026: I’ve paused ship every week for now.

I just had a 30 minute chat with Matt Webb. We managed to cover quite a few topics, and I left with many ideas which is always the sign of a good conversation.

Matt’s a profilic shipper. I particularly love the nature of his creations, he runs with his ideas and tries things without always having a clear destination in his head. There’s a freedom to this that I want to experience.

Side projects on side projects

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs are great with CLI tools—they can just --help and immediately understand what to do. CLI interfaces such as railway, vercel, gcloud, etc. give your coding agent the ability to manage these platforms for you. You don’t have to switch to a web UI and manually change things.

I’m working a lot with Langfuse. Langfuse doesn’t have a CLI yet, so I made one. I ported vicentereig’s unofficial client to Rust so it ran quicker, fixed a few issues I found, and added support for some missing functionality such as prompt management and eval creation.

Why I can build software again

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to context switch, and even harder to context switch between different levels of thinking—such as moving from writing code to creating an engineering strategy. Let’s quickly explain why:

Attention residue makes context switching cognitively costly. When we shift tasks, part of our mind stays stuck on the previous one.

Abstraction conflict drains energy. Switching between the concrete (fixing a bug) and the abstract (planning Q3 strategy) forces your brain to shift gears. You have to change not just the topic, but your entire mode of thinking.

I'm having fun

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am writing more code than ever. And it’s not even my day job.

Actually, that’s not correct. I’m not writing more code. I’m building more software than ever. The code is being written for me by an extremely confident, untiring partner.

And I’m having a great time.

As Armin Ronacher puts it, “the puzzle is still there, what’s gone is the labour”.

I’ve always been a product-focused technologist. I like building things for a purpose. The unrivalled joy I got from being a developer was when I made something appear on the screen that did something useful.

What I'm using AI for

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When speaking to friends who aren’t using AI tools much and I begin to evangelise, I often get asked “what do you actually use it for?”. So here’s a high-level summary. Note, it’s not exhaustive but aims to give an indication of the breadth of use cases.

Also, the examples shown are just examples, not a complete list.

Updated Jan 2026

Codegen – writing a lot of code (recent examples: Flow, Kotlin app for my touchscreen device without knowing any Kotlin)
Code review – reviewing code for quality, security, architecture, particularly when a new model comes out!
Brainstorming – product and implementation ideas for open source projects
Search – particularly when my search subject isn’t a specific thing (e.g. “what’s the essay Paul Graham wrote about gaining knowledge from reading books but not knowing which book it came from”)
Troubleshooting – solving issues (e.g. Spotify Connect on home network)
Internal tooling – creating transient tools (e.g. Github Spark tool for DX onboarding data collection)
Hardware/embedded software and config – Adding a Home Assistant bluetooth proxy to an ESP32 device, and turning off the LED
Document outlining – creating outlines for business cases, checking I’ve not missed key points
Articulation help – constructing arguments when my head’s cloudy
Codebase summarisation – understanding new codebases quickly
Home manual grounded agent – querying appliance manuals (“what does red flashing light mean on my dishwasher?”, “what is error code E123?”, “when do I need to clean my tumble dryer filter?”)
System administration – managing my machine and server (e.g. ffmpeg commands via Claude Code)
Log analysis – grokking logs quickly, to both find things and understand them
Weekly summaries – reviewing Teams messages, emails, docs, and notes changes
Image generation – creating images for presentations, documents (Engineering Chapter brand)
Learning plans – structured learning (e.g. “create me a 3 day learning plan, 1 hour a day, to learn evals”)
Legal document parsing – helped loads with house purchase
Product research – understanding specs (e.g. speakers)
Data reformatting – converting images to CSV, paragraphs to bullet points
Bringing old photos to life – recently colourised a load of my mum’s wedding photos
Making videos – Descript
Platform administration – see lf

The sound of empathy

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The false consensus effect is a cognitive bias that makes us think that most people are like us, that they share our beliefs, values and behaviours. We flock to those who reinforce our views in order to be accepted, to feel safe, and to improve our self-esteem. We’re fed information by social media algorithms that marries with our world-view and we gravitate towards news that confirms our existing beliefs. Thus, we rarely interact with those who clash with us, encountering them only when they’re used as a pawn in our discourse.

Papering over the cracks

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Getting things done in a complex organisation can be difficult. Legacy processes change over time and documentation becomes outdated quickly, causing friction.

We jump at the chance of making things better for everyone. We have identified an opportunity to streamline our processes. But we’ve got a deadline… so we look for a workaround, a quick fix. We dodge the obstacle and carry on with our work.

You reassure yourself that it’s only temporary and someone is already addressing the underlying issue. But deep down you know that this workaround will soon become ’the way'.

Appearance on the Best Work Podcast

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I spoke with Ben Henley-Smith from Cord on his Best Work podcast. I’ve done a few things like this before (including a host who came to chat to me, left, emailed saying he loved it and couldn’t wait to see how people responded to it, then ghosted me…) but this was the most enjoyable so far.

While the topic was ‘Best Work’, the conversation was pretty freeform and we discussed all sorts of topics. We covered Stoicism, death, the regret minimisation framework, relationships, how to make decisions, sleep, and loads more.

Another piece on Covid. Are you bored yet?

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to muster the energy to write this. Reading, talking, and writing about Covid is so boring. I’m fed up with it, of navigating statistics, reading policy changes, constantly thinking about my behaviours, of worrying about my family.

It’s horrendous, the deaths, the disabilities. 100 deaths a day, still, 2 years in. Children being sent to school without any protection, tens of thousands about to suffer from long Covid.

Addressing poor performance in an early stage startup

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I took a call today from a founder friend several months into his startup asking for advice on dealing with a poor performer they recently hired. The request was familiar to me, I’ve heard variations on the theme several times: “That engineer we hired a couple of months ago? They’re doing alright, but not quite at the pace we need. They have a few weeks until their probation is up, would love some advice on how to handle it”.

A minute of your time can make someone's day

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Offering condolences or giving praise are examples of activities that take us little effort but have a disproportionate impact on somebody’s day.

We hesitate—it may feel awkward, or we can’t think of the right words, or we may not think our words will mean that much, particularly if the potential recipient isn’t somebody close to us.

And yet, these words can make someone’s day. Malcolm Gladwell spoke of a conscious effort to be more public with his praise. He started making a point of telling the world about his five favourite writers, those who have heavily influenced his work. After a period of time with this routine, he received a handwritten note from Janet Malcolm, one of those he had been effusive about in his interviews, expressing her delight.

Your team should delight and surprise you

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Your goal is to build a team that constantly surprises you. You should be hiring for people who do things you can’t, who are better than you. Let go of your ego, you can’t be the best person any longer. You must accept that you’re managing people who are superior. Your job will now change, you become an enabler, a remover of friction, one who creates an environment for the special people you are now responsible for. Make them happy and free to do their work so they can delight themselves and you.

Embrace the hard stuff

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are often faced with difficult situations. We can face them head on but we often have a choice to take an easy way out. And sometimes we can sidestep them completely.

There are many reasons why it’s nearly always right to embrace the hard stuff.

Firstly: difficult things usually aren’t as difficult as they seem. The hard part may be starting, especially if it’s a large project without a clear goal (remember you can make a project less daunting by starting with the first step). Or it may evoke an emotion that we instinctively want to avoid, such as confronting a friend about a disagreeable behaviour, or having a difficult conversation with a work colleague. As we put these things off and they remain on our to-do list—or worse, in our heads—they grow in difficulty each time we decide not to do them.

Your children will copy you

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Your children will copy you. They see what you do. They will become what you demonstrate, they will take on your behaviours. Children are sponges.

Therefore you should be who you want your kids to become. You are their role model. Act virtuously at all times, Summum Bonum, lead your best possible life.

Define your principles, constantly reflect, and ensure you have a goal system.

It doesn’t matter how virtuous your words are if you are disingenuous in your actions.

Invisible

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine if you had an illness which left you with scales all over your neck and arms whenever you travelled. These scales are itchy, they stop you from sleeping, they distract you so you can’t concentrate, and they make you feel really shit.

Imagine your friend’s concern as they started appearing each time you got to your destination. Imagine how they’d approach a visit from you, checking to see if there was anything they could do to limit the impact of your disease. If you were going on holiday with a friend, imagine how the conversations about your destination would go, making sure that any environmental factors that impacted the severity of your skin issue would be discussed and together you’d choose somewhere that would make it as easy as possible for you.