Week 38: Chamonix to Martigny
Right now I’m focusing on climbing as much as possible, getting fit, losing weight and building things that have been on my list for a long time. I’m available for work from November 2026.
Chamonix to Martigny
Late on Sunday we decided to try riding our e-mountain bikes from Chamonix to Martigny in Switzerland. We’d had a chilled ride the previous Friday and thought this would be a good next one. We should have planned better and read more reviews. The photos we’d seen online were all the nice bits.
We rode 75km, including 500m of climbing where I had to push a 25kg e-bike uphill, and two very technical descents of about 900m each. We arrived in Martigny with 20 minutes to spare before the last train back to Chamonix.
Definitely type two fun.
How much money do I need?
I’ve been meaning to work out what I need to live on and where I could save money. I’ve recently had time to do something about it.
I built a personal finance app with Claude and ran a year of bank statements through it. I told Claude what I wanted, let it make quite a lot of the decisions and went with it. Then I tried what it had built and asked it to change the things I didn’t like.
I wasn’t too worried about the architecture. Claude knows more about that than I do. I wanted to see whether the result helped me understand my money.
I now have a dashboard of my spending, with future spending projected from last year’s. One useful finding was how much I was spending on Apple subscriptions. They just show up as “Apple” in the bank statements, so I couldn’t tell what they were.
Claude found the receipts in my email, matched them to the purchases and helped me unsubscribe. I’ve saved money from that alone.
AI life admin assistant
I’ve also been building an assistant called The Colonel with Claude. It watches my email, picks out what needs doing and books appointments into my diary.
I set up one agent to coordinate the other agents building it, with a pull request for each new feature. Some features looked useful until I tried them. Once I saw them working, I decided they weren’t adding much value, so we threw them away.
I booked a climbing trip for a few weeks’ time. The next morning it was in my briefing email, along with a reminder that I hadn’t sorted flights or travel to the airport. It had put time in my diary for me to do that.
The tasks are GitHub issues, shown on a board where I can see, move or close them. This week it drafted an email asking my insurance company to add my e-bike to the policy and attached the paperwork it thought they’d need. It also drafted an email to my accountant about a tax question from the finance app. I still send the emails.
It knows about the finance dashboard and tells me when a bill is due so I can check the bank. I’m not sure I’ve saved time yet, but I’m more on top of the things I’ve been avoiding.
Telling the GovTech Barbados story
I’m writing a series about my work at GovTech Barbados. I’ve gathered meeting notes, emails, documents and code history, and I’m using AI to help search them and reconstruct the timeline from my diary.
I’m checking it as I go. Some of the timeline is wrong because the records only contain part of what happened. There’s still work for me to do in filling the gaps and deciding what will be useful to people facing similar challenges.
That gives me a starting point for writing about what we did. I’ll share the first story next week.