In 2025, I read the The Secret History of the Five Eyes, about how the US, UK, Australian, Canadian & New Zealand spy agencies came to work together on intelligence gathering. Fascinating to me were the stories of William Stephenson, Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman and spymaster and Camp X, a WW2 paramilitary / covert agent training facility just outside of Toronto.

Looking at a map, the former Camp X facility is on Lake Ontario, not too far from the Oshawa GO train station. And there’s a brewery not too far from the Whitby GO station. I suggested to my wife we plan a day trip - take the GO train to Whitby, have lunch at the brewery, then walk along the lake towards Oshawa, see the Camp X memorial, and then walk to the Oshawa GO and make our way home. We did it, and it was a fun day, so we thought it would be fun to visit other breweries by GO. We’ve lived in Toronto for quite some time, and this was a fun way to explore beyond city limits, particularly without having to worry about driving or traffic. A brewery is as fun a destination as any, and GO weekend passes are $10, which seems like a great deal.

Botfluencer

I am seeing the term botfluencer being used to describe bot accounts that draw a human following. I propose the reverse definition.

Botfluencer: A human who’s work consists of creating content for consumption by bots, with the purpose of influencing the content bots generate.

Writing for Bots

I’d first heard of this idea of writing for bots in 2025 in a Complex Systems podcast, where host Patrick McKenzie stated:

In 2004, I was living in Toronto near Bathurst and Eglinton, and commuting by TTC to my job at a company that built control systems for pipe organs near Woodbine & John, in Markham - about 20 km. As spring approached, I thought it might be fun to try commuting by bike. I wasn’t 100% committed to the idea, so I was looking for something affordable - I found a used Miyata Civicross for which I paid $175. The Civicross is a hybrid entry level bike, made in Taiwan, sold in early 1990s.

This post was first published in The Evolving Analyst, a collection of writing on business analysis compiled by Marcus Udokang and Emal Bariali. Marcus and I discuss The Joy of Shipping on his podcast, The Inquisitive Analyst, which you can watch on YouTube.

Epigraph

“At Microsoft, there was no peer pressure to do anything except work and ship on time. If you did, you got a Ship-it Award. Easy. Black and White.” - Douglas Coupland, from his novel Microserfs

Introduction

When I built my blogging bot in 2023, I spent time thinking about how to make it interesting - the best results came from making my bot sum up forum threads. But there was no discussion, no personality. I then tried creating bot-bot discussions. I’d thought about having it participate in Twitter threads, but decided it was one thing to post what we now call slop, another to try to engage with slop.

Introduction

I was looking to spend some time to get a feeling for the current state of AI/LLM software development tools, and decided to try building a simple game using the OpenCode agent connected to the Claude Sonnet 4.5 LLM. I set out to build a 2 player lunar lander type game in the Godot game engine. I had never used Godot before.

The Build

Using OpenCode is a bit different from asking LLMs/ChatGPT to write code snippets. There is a plan mode and a build mode.