Sean Blanchfield

“The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is… 42.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

After millions of years of computation, Deep Thought finally outputs “42” as the answer to “life, the universe and everything”. But no one remembers what the question was. Douglas Adams was prescient as well as hilarious. It’s a bit on-the-nose now that many of us (and I’ll admit to this) have taken to lobbing 40-page deep research memos into Slack or Discord without being clear about what we were trying to answer.

Companies that started from 2023 onwards are the AI-native generation. Whether your company is younger or older than that, you need to figure out how to become AI-native, or prepare to get outcompeted. But what does an AI-native organization even look like? It’s not just a normal company with chatbots bolted on. The answer is pretty radical: an AI native organisation is effectively an AI multi-agent system.

Since November 2024, software has become approximately free to create.

The AI revolution isn’t coming — it’s here, upending our tacit assumptions about how organizations operate, what products should do, and who your customers will be tomorrow. If you’re selling software on the premise that it’s hard to build, you’re already behind.

Had a great chat with Mark Kelly on the AI Ireland podcast. A quick listen in which we cover AI, agents, the startup journey, the future, and more.

We are at the dawn of the generative AI revolution - the most significant technological innovation since the World Wide Web, and possibly the most significant ever. AI might be our last innovation, because all future innovations will be invented by AI.

The first provisions of the new EU AI Act recently came into force. I welcome the intentions of the EU AI Act, but it creates wide-ranging compliance hurdles for EU businesses at a vital time when we need to embrace the future, or opt out of it.

I was recently interviewed by Gary Fox, the founder of The Entrepreneur Experiment, a podcast that explores the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and rewards of starting a business, the importance of persistence, and the role of failure in the success of a startup.

I’ve been having back-to-back conversations about the AI agentic future for a few months now, and I’ve found people are throwing this new piece of “agent” jargon around a bit loosely, referring to pretty distinct things. Here’s what I’ve classified so far:

An ungraceful restart of my Home Assistant host left me with a corrupted sqlite3 database. This is the database where Home Assistant core stores the history of all entity state and long-term statistics, like energy and power readings. I could have deleted the old database and started over, but a better solution is to fix it. Here’s how I fixed it by SSHing into Home Assistant.

Dylan Collins and I recorded a podcast on the early days of Demonware, a video games middleware company we co-founded in 2003. Demonware developed multiplayer technology for video games studios on Xbox and Playstation, just as online gaming was going mainstream. Demonware’s splashscreen will be familiar to many gamers from the countless titles that have incorporated its technology, including major online franchises like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

Here is a highly detailed guide to how I built my floorplan UI for my Home Assistant-based smart home. This consists of an interactive realistic digital twin of each floor of my house, with dynamic lighting, doors, and windows.