As I have written about recently, the job market is in a state of significant change and uncertainty at the moment, and my personal circumstances are a reflection of that.

At the end of this week and after 7½ years, I will be leaving Deltatre for, well, nothing right now, and while that is scary and liberating in roughly equal measure I think it's also an opportunity.

One thing that I think is genuinely changing is the type — or shape — of individual that brings the most value, and I think (and hope) that this favours people like me.

The T-shaped individual has been a stalwart of tech teams for years (decades, even), but I think it's time to change the typographic analogy. It's time to be more tree-shaped.

I let AI help me think out loud, then didn't like how it sounded​

Confession time, though it's not much of one, because I don't think anyone reading regularly was fooled: the last few posts I've written about AI — the team-shape one, the judgement one, the whole "Whose Future Is It Anyway?" run — were drafted with heavy AI assistance[^1].

Not "AI wrote them and I hit publish." More that I was trying to build a proper thesis in real time, out loud, across several posts, and the fastest way I found to drag the shape of an idea out of my own head was to argue it out with ChatGPT first and edit the result after.

It worked, in the sense that the thesis is genuinely mine and I stand behind it. It also produced some of the most oddly flat writing I've put on this blog in a very long time of doing this[^2], and I couldn't immediately tell you why, because I was too close to it.

In recent months (and years) I have written about hitting those predictable institutional thresholds — the natural cycles where a senior technologist begins to look at the horizon and ask what comes next. I’ve joked openly about midlife crises, analyzed the predictable patterns of the seven-year itch, and questioned what it means to be a "veteran" in an industry that routinely worships youth.

Now, with my current role coming to an end on 31 August, I’m looking at a very specific set of numbers.

Way back in 2011 I invested a small but not insignificant amount in a scrappy, up-and-coming Scottish craft brewery called BrewDog.

Things went well for a time, and the brand grew. They opened some bars. A lot of bars, in fact. They made some good beers. And a few great beers. And latterly a lot of mediocre beers.

COVID and the subsequent cost of living crisis hit it hard, and in early 2026 it finally imploded under the weight of debts that the former CEO and all-round egomaniac James Watt saddled it with[^1] as part of his quest for expansion at all costs in search of FMCG unicorn valuations.

The brand got sold off to a US concern and James Watt promptly decided to set up a new brewery called "Second Best" and offer equity for free to former BrewDog shareholders.

So far, so par for his particular course...

Across this series, I've traced a clear, compounding trajectory.

Uneven global access feeds into platform dependency, which rapidly hardens into Asymmetric Corporate Expansion — a reality where a tiny handful of commercial boardrooms dictate the boundaries of global productivity.

None of this points to a single inevitable outcome.

It points to a system under pressure.

In the previous posts, I looked at how AI is reshaping access and dependency.

Capability is unevenly distributed across countries, platforms are becoming control points within them, and what starts as leverage can easily become dependency.

What happens when capability, access, and dependency all concentrate in the same place?

In the first two posts, I looked at how AI is reshaping outcomes at a global level.

• Accelerating disruption and opportunity at the same time
• Concentrating capability in a small number of countries and organisations
• Creating real risk of exclusion for those without access

But this dynamic doesn’t just play out between countries, it plays out within them, because even where access exists, control is uneven.

In the first post, I looked at the idea that AI is pulling us in two directions at once.

Massively accelerated disruption on one side, and the promise of prosperity on the other.

What both framings gloss over is a more uncomfortable question:

Who actually gets access to that prosperity?

Because AI isn't arriving evenly.

It looks like the Labour party is once again preparing to shoot itself in the foot, seemingly because the current Prime Minister is boring.

It's true that Kier Starmer lacks the charisma of... well... cold rice pudding, but after the clown car politics of the previous 14 years of Tory governments, I'll take boring and beige over braying and backbiting.

There’s a framing I’ve been coming back to recently, borrowed from Mo Gawdat.

During the Cold War, the dominant paradigm was MAD — Mutually Assured Destruction — but Gawdat suggests that with AI, we have the potential for something different:

MAP — Mutually Assured Prosperity.

It’s a neat idea, but I’m not convinced it’s that simple.