By Tom Watson in weeknote — 18 Jan 2026

Weeknote 33

A fair bit of travelling, a fair bit of building. Creating a tiny boring tool, a nice end to a project, and sometimes just listening.

A picture of the cold forest. Back to running pain free

What I did

A fairly busy week in the end. Left the house twice in one week!

Spent a fair bit of time prepping for the first big session for the Organisational Resilience programme next week, which will be two full days of OR immersion. The content and structure for my part of this has been in my head for a good while, but I needed to put this down in the workbook and into a Notion site. Part of this is constraining what goes in and what doesn’t. I know that live and in the moment, I can adapt and go in so many different directions, with different tools and resources. But that isn’t helpful in a workbook, as throwing too many things in really just confuses people. So choosing these things, not those things was the tough part. Clarity through constraint.
I visited a small CIC in Sunderland as part of a funder plus offer. The office was above a shop they run. I was nominally there to help them with a bit of simple data support. The founder seemed to be really struggling with so many things, and was getting advised from all sides, whether invited or not, to be more professional, to do this, do that. So I just listened, that was enough for today.
I finished off a project with an organisation I’d been supporting with a data strategy. We’d got to a ‘draft’ prior to christmas and this was a check in to see where to go next. When is something draft and when is something ‘live’? Well, for me it’s when people are using something to make decisions, as was already happening in this case. So where next? I smiled gave a few last pointers and said I think you’ve got this and let’s catch up in a few months.
Had a trip to Manchester on Friday to work with the Citizens Advice SORT innovation team which was nice as I’ve been an admirer of their work from afar for a while and so I'm pleased to be helping them in small ways.
Bought three domains. Someone stop me.
Managed to get my nagging calf pain sorted by introducing more pain (a rather brutal massage). Can get back to running again.
Wrote a post about constraints

Shared the Data For Action notion repository

I spent several evenings building, some big things, but also several small but useful tools and using it as an excuse to experiment with the various coding agents. One thing on my list that I’d never gotten round to was properly solving my ‘interesting things’ and link saving challenge. As part of these weeknotes I share various things I save during the week. A year ago when I moved to Ghost I’d built a very rudimentary integration with supabase, which allowed me to save links and have them embedded on a page called interesting links. But it was never quite right, and the interesting links page and the interesting things weren’t actually linked, so the weeknotes was a manual thing.

So I finally sorted it this week. I built a browser extension and mobile PWA, which

takes a link, runs an AI tagger on it
stores it in both a local sqlite database and github in either public or private
collates all the links from that week and pushes them to a weeknote in ghost in a couple of clicks.

That’s probably 15-20 minutes a week minimum and I'm saving on supabase costs. But how long did it take you to build it Tom? Probably 10 minutes writing a spec and 5 minutes making a couple of corrections in claude code if I’m honest. Tiny boring tools.

More building

Also this week I built a front end and some extra enhancements to the llms.txt tool I made last week. It's now an open source monorepo - so you can, if you so wish, deploy and run this for free. However if you'd rather just click a link, you can do so here. But what does it do Tom?

Well it crawls your website, seeing what you have and how you describe things, then creates an llms.txt file for you, making your organisation AI-discoverable with spec-compliant documentation. As more and more traffic goes via llm based interfaces now, this can be a way to help. The one I've built is tuned more towards social purpose organisations.

Interesting things

Why Cowork can’t work - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack - The future isn’t collaborative.
Is revitalising social clubs in coastal communities part of the answer to “deprivation bingo”?
How to spot the potential for systems change?
Why do we not do what we say we are going to do?
Rewilding Software Engineering Chapter 6: Myths we tell ourselves
everything is a ralph loop
The Done List - AI agents are revolutionizing productivity by transforming traditional to-do lists into 'done lists' of completed work awaiting approval. Learn how the disappearing middle of work changes everything about planning & productivity.
AGENTS.md - AGENTS.md is a simple, open format for guiding coding agents. Think of it as a README for agents.
Running Gas Town on Easy Mode - Probably like a few others I've been looking at Steve Yegge's Gas Town with some trepidation.
ProMoScribe - AI Audio Transcription Tool - ProMo Cymru - A simple, free tool for third sector organisations to transcribe audio files into text. Use it, copy it, adapt it!
What is a data democracy, and how can your company build one? | MIT Sloan - Leaders who actively design for the widespread use of data assets generate three times the revenue from data monetization compared with their peers.
Third Sector Trends in England and Wales 2025 Income sources, assets and financial wellbeing
National Lottery Community Fund: repurposing content for a UK-wide redesign
Mappler lite
Proton-API-Bridge: A third-party, open-source Proton API bridge (mainly focusing on Drive for now)

Links This Week

Ai

A Guide to Claude Code 2.0 and getting better at using coding agents - A deep dive into Claude Code 2.0 features, Opus 4.5 workflows, and context engineering. Learn sub-agents, MCP servers, hooks, skills, and practical tips to boost your AI-assisted coding productivity.

The Done List - AI agents are revolutionizing productivity by transforming traditional to-do lists into 'done lists' of completed work awaiting approval. Learn how the disappearing middle of work changes everything about planning & productivity.

GitHub - steveyegge/beads: Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent - Beads - A memory upgrade for your coding agent. Contribute to steveyegge/beads development by creating an account on GitHub.

Business

What is a data democracy, and how can your company build one? | MIT Sloan - Leaders who actively design for the widespread use of data assets generate three times the revenue from data monetization compared with their peers.

Data

Design

Mappler lite

Development

GitHub - henrybear327/Proton-API-Bridge: A third-party, open-source Proton API bridge (mainly focusing on Drive for now) - A third-party, open-source Proton API bridge (mainly focusing on Drive for now) - henrybear327/Proton-API-Bridge

Lifestyle

In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing - In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”

Productivity

Mappler lite

In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing - In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”

Research

Technology-criticism

In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing - In the face of technologies that sell us escapism at every turn, we need to build up tolerance for “inconvenience.”

Tools

Mappler lite