One of my first goals in using all I’m learning here was to automate the monthly income statement for my (small) organic granola company. For many years my husband and I just winged much of the accounting and financial details of our business. Waiting till tax time or the end of the year to cobble together what we needed. The reports from Shopify and square worked fine. But over the past few years, we’ve put more emphasis on growing the business and i honestly hate being in the dark. My husband is ok being a little loosey-goosey - good thing we aren’t financially dependent on this! It’s still very much a side hustle but it’s our brand and we take pride in the quality and integrity of our product and love our customers. So, on to the win… Today, I did it! I set up my folders, write my .md files. Tested, iterated and eventually nailed it. All I have to do is export my revenue, my expenses and fill in a few other details regarding events we do and presto. 4 steps, pausing along the way to reconcile any flags and finally landing at a clear picture of all the numbers of our business! Plus more regarding events we do, fees and other things we want to have to make future decisions. I’m excited to run all my stages for May. This made so much click for me. This might be basic but a huge win for me!

came back after a week offline and spent an hour just reading posts. people are shipping. full agent teams, named specialists, live clients. and i'm still on the foundation. but here's the honest version of what's actually happening. i build something. it works. then i look at it and realise it's not what i actually wanted. so i break it and start again. then halfway through the rebuild, a new idea comes in and now i don't know if i should finish what i started or pivot to the thing that's clearly better. i've rebuilt the same system three times in a month. and the worst part.. each version was better than the last. so was the rebuilding wrong? or is that just what building actually looks like before it locks in? genuinely asking because i can't tell if this is a me problem or if everyone here is quietly doing the same thing and just posting the final version.

Today was a massive win. I had my meeting with the Head of AI for our global group, and it went beyond anything I had imagined. The Pitch: 132 Orders and a "Broken" System I had the chance to present a real-world challenge: Manually processing 132 sales orders in April. The workflow is a nightmare: Open each order, find the amount, cross-check it with an Excel sheet, invoice it, and repeat. To make it worse, there is a known bug in our D365 environment where the amount column simply shows "0" in the grid, meaning I can’t just export a list. It requires manual clicks. In a busy finance department, this takes days because of constant interruptions. I presented my workflow and explained how this concept isn't just for one task—it’s a framework for almost every repetitive monthly task we have. I knew from my previous Rebill Project that if I can automate the "friction," I can win back my time. The Result: Skipping the Queue When I told the Head of AI that this could turn a 3-4 day job into about 1 hour, his eyes lit up. Even though Claude Code is still stuck in corporate governance (it's currently with our CEO to decide on a global rollout), he didn't want me to wait. He immediately assigned me a Microsoft Copilot Studio license. These are highly restricted—usually, there’s a long waiting list, and if you don't use it for 30 days, you lose it. He bypassed the entire queue to get me started right away. Moving the Needle with IT To get "Copilot Cowork" talking to D365, I had to submit a technical IT ticket to enable the Model Context Protocol (MCP). I made sure to CC both the Head of AI and my own manager. The Head of AI jumped straight into the ticket with this comment: "I talked to Allan today. He has an idea to speed up a process in finance and save days of work... The use of the MCP server for this would help him very much. Open for a call if needed or any other help for the team."

Everything is changing so fast. As a Millenial having lived through the introduction of PCs (loved my Apple LC II), dial-up internet, iPhones, now AI, can't believe how much has changed. Even AI, in december I remember people being skeptical of AI ads, then 4-5 months later it seems like if you don't do AI ads you're gonna be left behind. At the same time, while I love what I'm able to do with AI, worried about the environmental impacts and wonder if those will catch up to us before we figure things out. For my industry definitely seeing a need to upskill quickly to stay relevant, probably even by the end of the year. Wonder what others are thinking?

Whatever model you're using right now is good enough. The question isn't capability anymore. It's taste. Capability has been commoditizing for eighteen months. The benchmarks plateaued in the territory where the difference stops mattering for most work. The model is no longer the lever. Watch what the labs are shipping right now and notice the same thing from two directions. Anthropic shipped Claude design. Identity, typography, layout, voice, the editorial spine the whole product runs on. The brand has a point of view and they're letting it carry the surface. OpenAI shipped pets. Floating overlay. /pet command. Custom personality presets. The brand is leaning into character, presence, attachment. Don't read these against each other. Read them together. Both labs are reaching for the same lever at the same time, in different registers. Both are admitting taste is now load-bearing. Two flavors of the same lever Editorial taste fits a power-user surface. Rigorous. Stable. A design system signals reliability. Character taste fits a wider surface. Warm. Present. Pets signal companionship. Neither is "better." They're aimed at different rooms. Picking which room you're in, and refusing to be a generic version of all rooms, is the work. What this means for the rest of us If the labs are now competing on taste, the same thing is happening one layer down. To everyone using them. When AI gives you all the tools, your taste is the differentiator. To some extent. Craft, distribution, relationships still matter. But the lever that just rotated for the labs is rotating for the rest of us too. The model can't tell you what to make. Your judgment about what to do with all of it can. The takeaway The model is good enough now. The next leverage point isn't more capability. It's the judgment to use it well. Taste is the lever. For them. For us. Full breakdown. The good-enough plateau, the two registers of taste, and what it means for makers, all live here: https://aris-space.com/documents/thoughts-and-scribbles/the-taste-transition