AI brain food and vibe-coded watchers

Weeknotes from 17 April 2026

Things I did #

At work #

The six-month milestone #

I hit the six-month mark on my first Equal Experts engagement. It’s been fast-paced, high-impact, and honestly, it has absolutely flown by. We’ve achieved a huge amount in a short window, and I’m looking forward to building on that momentum.

AI as a grounded knowledge base #

A big part of our workflow lately has involved NotebookLM. We’ve fed it over 50 publicly available GOV.UK policy and guidance pages to help us map out service intent.

It’s been a fantastic tool for getting a handle on complex policy assumptions. We treat the outputs as starting points—assumptions that we then validate through user research—but as a tool for understanding how a service is intended to work, it’s been a game-changer.

Vibe-coding a watcher #

Keeping that AI context up to date quickly became a problem. Too many pages, too many small changes.

So I put together a small tool to track updates:
GOV.UK Policy Watcher

It’s deliberately simple. Paste in a list of URLs and it shows what’s changed in the last 15 days.

Rather than scraping pages, it uses the GOV.UK Content API to pull the underlying JSON. That means it picks up the quieter changes — the kind that don’t always trigger alerts but still matter.

No database, no accounts, no overhead. Just a quick way to sense-check whether anything’s moved.

It does rely on JavaScript, mainly to keep it fast and avoid introducing a backend. For something lightweight like this, that trade-off feels reasonable — but it’s a conscious one.

From a GDS point of view, it’s not trying to be a primary service. It’s a small, disposable tool for a specific user group — people already working in modern browsers, trying to stay on top of policy changes.

That said, I’ve tried not to ignore accessibility. The basics are there:

• clear structure and labels
• keyboard navigation
• screen reader-friendly updates
• no reliance on colour alone to convey change

It’s not perfect, but for what it is; a lightweight internal utility, it follows the same intent: start simple, meet a real need, and make it usable for as many people as reasonably possible.

At play #

AWS and Training #

In the spirit of keeping things technical, I’ve started some Solutions Architecture AWS training. It’s good to dive deeper into the infrastructure side of things, especially as AI and cloud services become increasingly intertwined.

Training and Side Projects #

Most of my energy outside of work has been going into getting out on the bike more and hitting the gym.

Fitness and Supplements App #

Naturally, since I’ve been training more, I’ve started building a fitness and supplements app to track my progress and keep things organised. It’s early days, but I’ll share a post on that soon.

Focus #

Still trying to stay off the phone more.

I’ve taken an old Pixel 5 and basically bricked it — stripped it right back so it’s closer to a dumb phone. No Chrome, no real distractions. Just a handful of useful apps for things like payments and scanning QR codes.

That created a small problem: the BOLT fitness app is a website, and without Chrome it wouldn’t run. So I turned it into a proper installable app, first as a Progressive Web App, then packaged as a native Android APK using Capacitor. The PWA approach was quick to set up, but Android ties PWAs to Chrome under the hood, so if Chrome is disabled the app dies with it. Wrapping it with Capacitor solved that, it runs in the system WebView instead, which is a separate component that can’t be disabled. The result is a proper home screen app that works independently of any browser.

As a result, I’ve found myself paying with Android more and generally using the phone with a bit more intent.

A bit about me: I'm a UCD specialist focused on Service Design, with a passion for accessibility and creating services for all. I navigate the world with a dry sense of humor, finding the funny side in the most mundane tasks.

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