"Entremanure at Misery Farms"

"Entremanure at Misery Farms" is what my friend Monty calls me. Monty is an 80-odd-year-old eccentric beekeeper that I call in and visit every few weeks. Monty showed my father the ropes with keeping bees, and then he taught me.

Monty's rough as guts and his house is a bomb site, but boy does he have an eye for detail and a brilliant mind for thinking outside the box. The whole place runs like a permaculture textbook, even though he's never heard of Bill Mollison or David Holmgren. Grape vines shade his verandah through summer, then drop their leaves to let the winter sun through. Hooligans jumping his back fence? He planted prickly pears - heaps of them. Spare room on the shed roof? Beehives. Wasted space otherwise!

He's hilarious.

Anyway, the landscape of entrepreneurialism is changing. Challenges are shifting. The pendulum is swinging, once again.

I know what it feels like to be crushed by regulations, and so do millions of people across the globe and across town. Regulations crush the little guy; the big corporations can soak them up. AI is handing the power back.

I often think about the "Window Tax" that the Brits lived under from 1696 until 1851. Year after year they were taxed based on the number of windows they had. Many resisted and bricked up their windows - and legend has it that's where "daylight robbery" comes from.

The landscape is shifting very fast, and this week I've had my eyes opened as to what "AI" really is. Most of us use AI to "google" or create funny images. Run some stats or comparisons. This week I rolled up my sleeves and had a real go at Claude Code.

I don't know how to code. I posted on a few forums as a youth and the best I could do was "You are an absolute [b]IDIOT[/b]!"

But Claude Code knows how to code. In the last 48 hours I have:

• Built a basic website that's been nagging at me for years - www.nguniaustralia.com. About two hours for Claude Design to mock it up and Claude Code to deploy.

• Created a landing page for our Winter Feast.

• Developed far better landing pages for my products, which I'm in the process of rolling out. This previously would have cost thousands of dollars and weeks, if not months, of time with web developers.

• Had Claude Code digest every blog, social media post, podcast and YouTube transcript involving yours truly on the internet, and build a "Farmer Jake" chatbot - going live on the website soon, chock-full of funny dead ends and easter eggs.

These are all nice little tasks that help shift the needle. Previously, for someone like me, they would have required subcontractors, agencies, weeks of time, planning & input, delays, and cash. Today - I did it all after I put the kids to bed.

It's a whole new world, and I'm excited!

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