Errol Schmidt | AI & CTO Advisor

After many years at reinteractive, next week I begin a new chapter. I'll be launching an independent consultancy focused on: - AI strategy - Fractional CTO leadership - Technology review and transformation - Engineering advisory - Safe and practical AI adoption Over the past decades I've worked closely with startups, scale-ups, and established businesses navigating technology decisions, from software architecture and engineering leadership through to the very real questions emerging around AI. What has become increasingly clear to me is this: Most businesses do not need more hype around AI, and most businesses don't have a clear strategy when it comes to tech implementation. They need clarity. They need someone who can help them: - Identify real opportunities - Avoid expensive mistakes - Modernise safely - Align technology with business goals - Make practical decisions in a rapidly changing environment That is the work I'll be focusing on. Alongside this, I'll continue growing Technology for Humans, exploring how technology and AI affect the way we work, create, and live. Melbourne-based. Working remotely with businesses across Australia and internationally. If you'd like to connect or collaborate, feel free to reach out.

@chadfowler @rubycentralorg @rubyconf well done to everyone! (including you Chad)

Amazing job @rubycentralorg on @rubyconf’s quarter century anniversary conference this week. The organization, MCs, program, and community facilitation were excellent. Makes me proud to have ever been involved.

@JasonSwett Sounds like me when I used to write in PHP

At this stage I’m just making shit up as I go.

@dannyvankooten Do everything possible to migrate off WP. I’m sorry to people who love WP, but it is just not safe or secure.

One of my sites did not auto-update to WP 7.0.2. Got an email notification this morning that my administrator password was changed. Oof. This is new to me. How do I properly clean-up? Already deleted the 4 new admin users, changed passwords, rotatd secrets, verified checksums.

@ScottNorth64736 Perhaps interest rates are going the wrong way

Australia is looking real good right now…..

@jeremysmithco Thanks Jeremy - it was a fun conversation, and we touched on some really important points.

I really enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with Errol! We got into a ton of great topics! ☺️

How does Ruby on Rails thrive in the AI coding era? @jeremysmithco and I discuss why Rails may be ideal for AI-assisted development—and why AI tools still rarely choose it. Hotwire, vibe coding, junior jobs and the future of the Ruby community: Youtube: youtu.be/kypSWd4yoW8 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7fiyQv…

@inazarova Familiar faces in there!

RubyConf!

@mhenrixon multi-cyber-lingual

This evening, I have programmed in Rust, Go, Elixir, Crystal, Php, Python, Ruby and JS. How's your day going?

@excid3 @hatchboxio That's a good looking graph!

We're handling over 100,000 deployments a month now on @Hatchboxio. Hatchbox started as a side project and has now become our core business. It's incredibly hard to bootstrap a product like this when all the competitors are VC-backed, but that didn't stop us from bringing affordable app deployments to the community. ❤️

@GregMolnar I don’t have any of this growing but I still don’t have enough ducks

I grow this water hyacinth as duck food. It is actually classified as an invasive species, because it spreads pretty quickly, but that's bollocks. If you have too much of this, it means you have a duck deficiency.

@Shpigford @adamdotnew Rule in SaaS pricing, "Charge more." ref: stripe.com/au/guides/atla…

ummmm @adamdotnew please tell me this is a typo

@jun_song Funny that Elon made so much noise about how concerned he was about AGI, and then went on to prove that his brand could not be trusted to manage something even without AGI

SpaceXAI just dropped a statement regarding the data stealing on Grok Build. They confirmed they are copying our entire env files and codebase. Their only answer? Just turn off your privacy settings if you don't like it. They've lost a lot of credibility today.

I remember the days when AI could do 20-30% of the development work. And we thought that was incredible.

@thsottiaux Thanks - I got super confused this morning when I looked at usage and the 5h was missing! I was expecting to have to use a reset after churning overnight.

Morning. The last 48 hours of Codex and ChatGPT Work have been intense! Three important updates: - Temporarily removing the 5 hour usage limit restriction for all Plus, Business and Pro plans - Rolling out changes that will make GPT 5.6 Sol more efficient across the board and that will be reflected in less usage being used so that it can take you further. Exact impact to be quantified and shared - We hit 6M active users, and are landing a usage reset in the next hour Go do things

@sama Took a ton of tokens, but I (we) built a professional end to end video editing suite; from recording in app, to editing, color grading, audio mixing, effects, LLM editor, captioning and shorts automation through to final render. Replaces three different SaaS tools!

i'd love to see interesting things people have built with 5.6 sol. i will send the person who made the coolest thing a special gift from the openai archives.

@thomasschulzz Now that is a great idea

How to make your own font with GPT 5.6: > Go to Cursor/Codex > Boot up GPT 5.6 Sol xhigh > Say "Make me a custom font for my brand. *insert vibes*. *insert font references via screenshots*. Ensure you have ttf and otf files generated" > Get result > Provide feedback on all the little details: font weight, glyph height/width, etc > Or be more drastic and say "change everything" to see different vibes entirely > Loop the feedback until your happy > Ask GPT 5.6 to make you a showcase website to display your new font Voila enjoy your custom font that nobody else has

@babayagatwt Most importantly they have Demis - probably the smartest of them all

I still can’t figure out why Gemini struggles to compete with Claude and GPT. - Owns Chrome - Backed by Android - Stores most search results - Holds ~95% search history - Google has the biggest user data - Even incognito data isn’t fully private So what’s the problem?

@paulg Here's an idea - lets help students to use AI responsibly as a genuine study tool

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.

@paulg or they looked up answers in a text book or using google.

@gregisenberg love to put my hand up. My key teaching is that most businesses today are techs, but they don't always know it. Few have competent staff to run their tech, and even less have real CTO's. The future will be won by those who understand this.

Who wants to come on my podcast this week? 2,000,000+ listens per month. 1. You teach one AI tool, skill, or framework that helps people build a business 2. You can have 1 follower or 1M, doesn't matter 3. You come prepared Tag someone or tag yourself. Lets go.