The server can now ‘move you in’

Hey everyone. This week: updates to the Small Business System (SBS), thoughts on not using AI to do your creative work, but using it to solve the biggest chore of all: organising your existing stuff into our pre-built systems. I’ve built that, it works, it’s amazing, and you can use it today.

SBS improvements

Lucy just added a whole bunch of links to the Small Business System. She’s into ‘unsexy, boring, functional, government information’³ – and she’s right: there’s so much stuff out there if you go looking for it. We get most of ours from the Australian government; much of it has broader relevance, but if you need help dealing with administration, make yourself familiar with your local, state, and national government’s resources. There’s more there than you expect, it’s often really good, and you’ve already paid for it!

AI: grunt work. Human: creative stuff

Speaking of government advice, Lucy also subscribes to a bunch of newsletters and she noted last week that much of the guidance around AI seems to be to use it for your marketing. I suspect this is advice given without much thought, so I’m not criticising those that give it – they’re probably not AI experts, and they’re certainly not being paid to be.

But: it’s awful advice! Your customers can smell AI generated ideas, copy, and images a mile off and we all hate it! You hate it: why would you think your customers wouldn’t?

As with so much technology advice, I think it’s given by people who aren’t technologists; who don’t understand what you can do with AI, and who, asked to give advice in a newsletter, fall back to the obvious stuff. Everyone understands words and pictures, so they become the go-to.

Instead, think about how it can take some of the burden from your back-office chores. The other day I recorded a video showing how I use Johnny.Decimal to keep my password manager organised. (Lucy’s editing it now; out soon.) Rather than worry about showing my own data, I wanted to create a bunch of realistic demo logins that I could show without Lucy having to blur them out.

AI is amazing at this sort of thing. Because it’s technical, repetitive grunt-work. It’s work that I could have done, had I wanted to spend two of the most boring hours of my life creating fake logins. Is that a good use of my time? It is not.

In the past, you needed to be a computer programmer to do this sort of thing. You needed to know a scripting language. It still helps to have this base knowledge, and we’re not yet at the point where you can just say ‘computer’ into the air and have it know exactly what you want, no mistakes. But we’re a long way from me needing to write a script, and I think that’s great. It’s going to be incredibly democratising. (I recorded a rough video showing that process too.)

Get your AI to do the boring work, so you have more time to do the creative stuff. Don’t ever give that up.

I can now ‘move you in’ to Life Admin or Small Business

Speaking of the boring work – what’s the hardest part about getting organised? It’s doing the work of actually getting organised. What if someone could take your existing stuff, analyse it all, apply all the rules I’ve developed over the last 15 years, and move it into a fresh copy of the LAS or SBS for you?

This is live, now, on the MCP server. I’ve tested it on my manufactured ‘messy company’ data set and it scores up in the 90% range.⁴

The bad news is that it can take as long as … half an hour. ;-)

Just briefly, because I’ll get up a proper blog post shortly, here’s what happens.

You connect the server (video here). You might need to be using a terminal version of your software, i.e. Claude Code, Codex. The GUI versions might work, I haven’t tested.
Ask it to help you ‘move in’ to a new JD system.
It’ll analyse your system, asking you clarifying questions.
It’ll download and configure the CLI, my skills, and the LAS or SBS as required.
It’ll show you, step by step, what it plans to do. You approve, it moves. Job done.

Importantly, I’ve built it so your LLM doesn’t move files directly. It depends on the JD CLI which now has a jd move command. That command records a log of every move (at ~/.jd/journal.jsonl), so you have a full history of everything that happened. Moves are undoable. The jd command can’t delete files.

The overall process is logged at 00.05 in the target system’s JDex, and is resumable via this log. You can ask it to move you in category by category and check out partial results.

This is still very early, and it’s behind a ‘beta’ flag. Your agent will ask you to turn that on. I’m confident that this won’t wreck your life, but as with anything AI, be cautious. LLMs are unpredictable by design. It’s what makes them useful. Have backups. Seriously, not kidding, have backups.

I’d love to hear from you if you use it. I think it’s amazing. It needs a Pro account or higher. I’ve recorded a video, it’s in the editing queue.

Lunch?

Last week, we met our first Decimal!¹ We caught up for lunch in Sapporo. It was life-affirming, really, to look someone in the eye who uses this thing we make. Next week we’re heading to South Korea – let us know if you’re there.²

Footnotes

¹ Actually I met a lovely Decimal in Canberra one time, but I won’t count that as it’s where we lived, and Lucy wasn’t there. Hi, Joel!
² I’ll email you, Caleb.
³ A strong argument for the Oxford comma.
⁴ The messy data generator knows, ideally, in which ID the messy data should be stored. It scores the ‘move in’ result against this ideal.

Talk soon,