Most of this was written on my iPhone last weekend, on the Tube to the Opera from Mum’s and over a coffee in Covent Garden before curtain up.
I’ve been in this space two years more or less.
It was two years ago I first sat down at UEG - in Vienna - I remember the hotel room. I used Claude and I brainstormed my life and what I was doing. At this point I was dissatisfied with my life and the direction. Because I felt good physically but frustrated things were not happening.
This was the first time - using Claude - that I could brainstorm and get what felt like a genuinely credible sparring partner. To help me organise my brain and my thoughts.
For the next year I used Claude and GPT across different models as an executive coach.
Each time a new model came out or a thread got full (remember when that used to happen!!!) then the last task was to update my master executive coaching thread. And this got better and better and better.
I used this to organise my thinking and to plan what I was doing. It was not my right hand man (I was lacking that and I still am - it has to be a human) but I had a brainstorming strategy partner - very very useful - one that didn’t tire.
My problem has never been lack of ideas or understanding or drive or ambition. It has been the ability to keep my thoughts organised enough to enable me to act on them.
Generate a rough idea. Capture it. Spin out a rough idea to share with the team.
The rule
I started to use the tools to help get some writing done. Not first drafts.
First problem - some of it was rubbish. The talking back. The language. Sycophantic. Making stuff up - hallucinations. Update the executive coaching prompt - language instructions. How to talk to me. How to not.
Never let AI do the first draft. Or the last.
The writing ability got better. For a long time GPT Pro was by far the best for this. Gemini 3 and NotebookLM - fun - videos - research capture - but …
That was about a year ago.
A vault called brain
Then Cowork came along. And so I started there. Built an MVP Obsidian vault - just a linked folder of plain text notes - called, simply, “brain”. Not even Charlie’s brain - just “brain”.
The first months of capture were optimising the system. Not so much in there yet to be really useful, but starting to build out the whole - who, where, how, when.
Each person with a stub.
Each idea with a stub.
Each project, each link.
Think, write, capture.
Then enough information in the vault for it to start to be really useful. Work - life - admin - jobs lists. Not doing the stuff for me but keeping it there. I still do the work - or rapidly parse it for delegation.
Second problem - AI artefact creeping in. Capture mechanisms not sophisticated enough to separate my voice from AI interpretation. A simple tweak - strictly separating my raw words from AI summaries. Still not perfect. But better. Much better.
The next unlock
The next unlock - truly - more powerful models capable of holding very large context windows and using the vault for a “throughlines analysis” - finding hidden patterns across months of my own notes. Fable 5 amazing for this in the personal side of the vault. But in the other lanes - everything for work blocked. Darn that was annoying. And with Fable 5 I kept running out of credits. Spending lots of money.
Back to GPT - now much much better - GPT-5.6 Sol. Stopped using the vault and Cowork day to day. But using Codex - wow - wtaf - now the AI is building. Complex analysis, figures, brainstorming with outputs (useful artefacts) and more. Family tree, projects, websites! Spending lots of money on credits again - this time to OpenAI.
Then Opus 5.5 - this changed everything again. Claude is miles and miles ahead now. There are no restrictions (only my plague search - on IBD genetics lol - caused a block last weekend). I can build figures and animations and use my vault now to its full potential.
Why plague? The plague scare in Siberia sent me back to the Black Death. People with certain variants of an immune gene called ERAP2 were far more likely to survive it - and those same variants are linked to Crohn’s disease today. The safety filter didn’t like the word plague. A story for another post.
Cowork running fully on the cloud. Capture by voice - writing - drawing - recording. Outputs as .md - simple markdown text files that I own.
And perhaps the next biggest unlock (the penultimate one for now): building HTML for the outputs. Fire 🔥 - me and my team - to share.
Not just for me
Finally it isn’t just a system for me. I have sites that are for me and the team. Same source code. Full for me with all my raw thoughts. Redacted for the team so it is cleaner. Both have comments / requests boxes. So the team can feed back. Suggest changes. Ask for outputs. All the references linked to my (and the team’s) Zotero database.
A new public website for the team. One for the observability project. One built for the (very complicated) extended family tree.
Now it isn’t just in my head - or in the vaults - or my notes - now I can bring the team along. The big vision. The next most important task.
And now we build the vault - the brain for the team - we build it further. And in Edinburgh we can use ELM - the university’s own AI innovation platform - world leading. Huge locally run open weights models. We are getting ready to build serious compute within the safe haven environments for our LIBDR/DataLoch build.
We have the data - population wide - 20 years longitudinal with everything across inflammatory markers, deep phenotypes and all primary and secondary care and nationally held health data. Unique. Writing the next decade of IBD care.
The ideas. The team. The motivation.
It is going fast. Very fast.
Switching off
The catch? How to slow down. How to switch off. For me? I’m learning …. Some days more than others.
But outside work and my capture I’m going analogue.
Vinyl - old and new with scratches and imperfections - but glorious analogue sound. Books - real ones made of paper with pages that you physically turn. Newspapers - they require a London origin to have the skills of turning a page on the Tube … and which leave ink on your fingers. The notebook and fountain pen which leaks occasionally and bleeds into your shirt pocket. Art - photos - live music.
On Sunday, 5.5 hours of Wagner at the Royal Opera House - on my own - because I wanted to. Next week I’m going to buy a film camera (again!). I’ve been editing all my photos with less clarity and more grain for months now … did you notice already?
I’m a techno optimist. The next years are going to be wild. I’m fully AI-pilled and locked in for the next while.
Also slightly terrified.
And need better ways of dealing with my existential dread alone. Running for hours in the hills until my feet bleed works. Writing works. Taking photos works. And sharing them too.
The Wagner was magnificent.
Reach out if you feel some or any of this.
PS The latest unlock - Charlie’s Desk. One page that holds everything I’ve built. Amazing on my laptop and my phone. The ultimate hub for everything. I’ll share how I built all of this - and how you can start - in upcoming posts.