How AI
Blew My
Mind

We Actually Launched
A Thing. With AI.

Here's the backstory. My wife Natz has been obsessed with interior design for fifteen years. Not in a casual Pinterest-saves way — in a genuine, deep, "let me explain why that paint colour will make the hallway feel smaller" kind of way. For fifteen years she's been redecorating our home, moving furniture while I'm at the shops, and offering unsolicited opinions on everyone else's walls. Now, finally, she has paying students to direct that energy toward instead of me. AI made this happen.

This week we launched Little Beatrice — an AI-powered interior design mini course aimed at regular people who want to transform their homes without hiring a proper interior designer. And here's how the week actually went: I described what we wanted to Claude, and then we just... built it.

The sales page came first — complete with an editorial image layout using AI-generated room visualisations (ChatGPT Images has been doing the heavy lifting here — more on that below), a full course breakdown, and a personal bio section introducing Natz as the woman who's been obsessing over this stuff since before most of the design tools she now uses even existed. Then came the download page — that secure, slightly-hidden URL where buyers get their files after paying. Then Stripe. Then a post-purchase email flow using Stripe's built-in receipt customisation. Then a GDPR-compliant cookie consent banner. Then three Reel scripts for Natz to use without staring at a blank page.

And ChatGPT's image generator was central to all of it. Natz used it to visualise colour palettes and room schemes for the course materials — a moody midnight-and-gold bedroom, a coastal calm home office, a forest retreat inspired living room. The kind of images that would have cost a fortune to shoot or render professionally. Now she types a prompt, reviews a handful of options, and picks the one that matches her vision. Previously she'd been generating room proposals to show me — and then asking me to "just imagine it." Progress, genuinely.

The Canva Moment —
And Why I Love It

Not everything was seamless this week, and honestly, this particular moment was one of the more interesting ones precisely because of how it went wrong. We were trying to create editable Canva moodboard templates for Little Beatrice — ten premade moodboards where buyers can drop in their own photos. Logical, useful, achievable. Right?

Claude actually has a Canva integration built in. So we designed ten moodboards, exported them into Canva, and then tried to make them editable so buyers could customise them. Here's where it got interesting: Canva treats Claude's exported designs as what it calls "controlled pages." The entire design gets sealed into a locked object. You can see it, you can't touch it — the individual elements aren't exposed to Canva's editor or API. Just pixels inside a sealed box.

Here's the thing though. Claude didn't pretend it could fix it. It diagnosed the problem clearly, explained the technical reason, and then gave us a practical workaround: manually add native Canva frames on top of the locked areas. A few minutes in Canva's editor — job done. The editable moodboard experience still works, just via a slightly different route. That kind of honest, structured problem-solving is exactly what makes working with AI genuinely useful rather than frustrating.

Google Just Rewrote
What "Assistant" Means

While I was heads-down building Little Beatrice, Google had the audacity to hold Google I/O 2026 and announce approximately one hundred things that each deserve their own newsletter. Let me pull out the ones that made me stop scrolling.

First: Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google's new model matches the big frontier models on coding and reasoning at the speed of their lightweight Flash tier. It's now the default powering AI Mode in Google Search, which recently crossed one billion monthly users. Let that land for a second. A billion people using AI search every month.

But the thing that genuinely made me sit up was Gemini Spark. Google is calling it "your personal agent" — and for once that description actually holds up. Spark operates across Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and your wider digital life, taking actions on your behalf overnight and delivering a briefing in the morning. Not just surfacing information. Doing things. It reads your inbox, your calendar, your tasks — and proactively handles whatever you've asked it to stay on top of. That's the dream right there.

Google also launched Google Pics, their new AI image creation and editing tool built into Search — putting them squarely in competition with what OpenAI's image generation has been doing. Given how much I've been using ChatGPT's image tools this month, I'm genuinely curious to see how it stacks up. And as if all that wasn't enough: Apple confirmed Gemini will be powering a new, more personalised version of Siri later this year. Apple and Google. Working together on your iPhone's assistant. The world is properly strange now.