Rangefront Insights
Advice, thoughts and opinions on software, AI, industry and the work behind it.
How to measure AI and automation ROI without fooling yourself
Guess the minutes saved, times a salary, and any project looks like a triumph on a slide. A number you can defend starts before you build and counts the costs the pitch leaves out.
Most AI training teaches the party trick, not the work
The room laughs, the demo dazzles, and nobody learns the thing that matters: what data is safe to paste, how to check an output, and where AI is the wrong tool.
A council AI assistant that guesses is worse than no assistant
The stakes for a council assistant aren't convenience, they're accountability. It has to answer from approved sources, cite them, and refuse the questions that belong to a person.
Claude Opus 5 does the hard technical work without flagship pricing
Frontier-level coding and agentic capability at $5 per million input tokens, the same price as the model it replaces.
A field app that needs signal is a field app that fails
The demo runs on office wifi. The job runs beside a gate with one bar and a flat battery. Build for the second one or staff go back to paper and you're left paying for a licence.
AI search for policies and procedures, and the day it reads out the payroll file
AI search over your documents is genuinely useful and genuinely dangerous. The difference is whether permissions and versions are enforced where it counts, not bolted on.
The great AI cost crunch is already here
Unlimited frontier-model usage is giving way to budgets, routing, caching and harder product decisions.
You vibe coded an app. Now comes the hard part.
AI tools make building an app astonishingly easy. Getting it hosted, secured and in front of paying customers is a different job, and it's the one the chat window can't do.
The one-giant-farm-system pitch fits nobody. Build the layer, not the monolith.
Mixed ag runs on several versions of the truth, and the fix isn't one giant system that replaces them all. It's a thin layer that connects the records a decision actually needs.
Healthcare admin automation in Toowoomba: where the data goes decides everything
In healthcare the first question isn't what to automate, it's where the data goes when you do. Get that wrong and a time-saver becomes a notifiable breach.
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A useful note, occasionally.
Occasional writing on software, automation, data and AI, sent when there is something useful to say.