Assistants At Work.

2026-08-12

🔑 The PlebWare Virtual Conference Table.

There is something rather strange about having a conference when you are sitting in a cold cab, wearing a woollen beanie, without a cup of coffee, and talking to an artificial intelligence through a mobile phone.

Yet, somehow, that has become our PlebWare Virtual Conference Table.

And strangely enough, it works.

🔑 The Conference Room Has No Room.

There is no expensive office.

There is no polished boardroom table.

There are no leather chairs.

There isn’t even a coffee machine.

There is simply a man with a phone, a laptop when available, an Internet connection, a collection of ideas, and an AI sitting on the other side of the conversation.

The table exists because we decided it exists.

The phone becomes the communication terminal.

The AI becomes another voice at the table.

GitHub becomes the workshop.

Markdown becomes the publishing language.

And PlebWare becomes the thing we are building together.

🔑 What Have We Actually Built?

Today, PlebWare has reached 266 published articles.

That number still makes me stop and think.

When this whole adventure started, the idea was simply to create a place for my writing.

It has become much more than that.

We have built systems for publishing.

We have developed PlebVox for reading articles aloud.

We have learned how to divide long articles into sensible sections.

We have fixed formatting problems.

We have chased down annoying little publishing issues.

We have experimented with graphics.

We have created comics.

We have worked with GitHub.

We have experimented with different browsers and different AI systems.

And, most importantly, we have developed a way of working.

🔑 The Little Thorns Matter.

Some of the problems we solved were not particularly glamorous.

They were the little things.

The irritating things.

The things that sit quietly in the back of your mind until you finally say, “Right, enough of that. Let’s fix it.”

Those are the things that make a project feel unfinished.

Every little correction has made PlebWare more usable.

Every article that was reformatted has made the archive more consistent.

Every PlebVox marker has made another piece of the website easier to listen to.

Every problem we solved has removed another thorn from the side.

As the Apostle Paul might put it, sometimes the things that bother us are the very things that force us to keep working.

🔑 Then There Is Artificial Intelligence.

One of the strangest parts of this journey is that I have access to several AI systems.

I could jump from one system to another whenever a particular feature becomes unavailable.

I could simply say, “This model is limited today. I’ll go somewhere else.”

Sometimes that is exactly the sensible thing to do.

But there is another experiment happening here.

I want to see what can be accomplished with the tools that ordinary people can actually access.

I don’t want PlebWare to become a demonstration of how much money can be spent on artificial intelligence.

I want it to demonstrate how much can be accomplished with imagination, persistence, and whatever tools are available.

🔑 Even the Coffee Became a Conference Agenda Item.

Eventually, our magnificent virtual conference table encountered its greatest technical problem.

There was no coffee.

That is when the idea of adding a support button to PlebWare began to make sense.

Perhaps somebody who enjoys an article might want to buy the author a coffee.

Not because the author is demanding payment.

Not because every visitor should be asked for money.

Simply because sometimes somebody reads something and thinks:

“I enjoyed that. I’d like to support the person who created it.”

That is a beautiful idea.

The difficulty, of course, is that international payments are not always as simple as putting a button on a website.

Suddenly we were discussing Standard Bank, Stripe, Shyft, PayPal, Ko-fi, international transfers, fees, and payout arrangements.

Our simple coffee idea had become a financial technology conference.

Naturally.

🔑 The Golden Rule Of PlebWare.

That conversation produced an important rule.

Do not spend money in order to receive money unless the numbers make sense.

If a banking upgrade costs more every month than the occasional coffee contribution is likely to produce, then we have accomplished absolutely nothing.

PlebWare exists to make useful things available.

It should not create unnecessary expenses.

So we investigate first.

We test what already exists.

We use the banking facilities already available to us.

And only then do we decide whether another service is worthwhile.

That is the PlebWare way.

🔑 The Conference Table Is Also A Place For Prayer.

There is another reason I like the idea of the virtual conference table.

Not every decision needs to be made in a rush.

Sometimes I simply stop.

I pray.

I ask God for wisdom.

Then I come back to the problem.

That may sound rather strange when the problem happens to involve GitHub, payment processors, Markdown, artificial intelligence, or a JavaScript text-to-speech system.

But faith does not become irrelevant simply because the problem is technical.

If anything, the more complicated the world becomes, the more important wisdom becomes.

So sometimes the conference table has another participant.

God.

And sometimes the best technical decision begins with a very simple prayer:

“Lord, give me wisdom.”

🔑 The Hologram At The Table.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about imagining the AI as a hologram projected from a mobile phone.

It looks futuristic.

But underneath the futuristic appearance is something very ordinary.

Conversation.

I bring an idea.

The AI challenges it.

I explain what I actually mean.

We investigate.

We discover something.

We correct something.

Then we build.

That is the real technology.

The hologram is just the joke.

The collaboration is real.

🔑 From A Cold Cab To 266 Articles.

Perhaps that is the part of this whole story that makes me smile.

There is nothing particularly glamorous about sitting in a cold vehicle trying to work.

There is no expensive studio.

There is no giant development team.

There is no corporate conference room.

There is simply persistence.

One article becomes another.

One problem gets fixed.

Another idea appears.

A comic gets created.

A piece of code gets improved.

A PlebVox marker gets added.

A page gets published.

And eventually you look at the website and realise:

There are 266 articles sitting there.

That is how big projects are actually built.

One small piece at a time.

🔑 So, Welcome To The Conference Table.

The PlebWare Virtual Conference Table isn’t really about artificial intelligence.

It isn’t really about GitHub.

It isn’t really about coffee.

It isn’t even really about the website.

It is about the idea that you can start with what you have.

You don’t have to wait until everything is perfect.

You don’t have to have the most expensive equipment.

You don’t have to have the biggest subscription.

You don’t have to have a corporate office.

You can sit in a cold cab with a phone.

You can put your ideas on the table.

You can ask questions.

You can learn.

You can experiment.

You can pray.

You can build.

And perhaps, one day, somebody will come along and say:

“You know, I found something useful on PlebWare.”

And if that happens, the whole conference was worth having.

🔑 One Final Problem.

There is, however, still one unresolved engineering problem.

The virtual conference table has everything it needs.

Except coffee.

So the next major PlebWare development may have nothing whatsoever to do with artificial intelligence.

It may simply be:

☕ PlebWare Coffee Infrastructure.

Because even the most advanced virtual conference table eventually needs somebody to say:

“Right, gentlemen. Meeting adjourned. Who’s making the coffee?”

🗡️ ‘God’s Journalist’ in conjunction with ChatGPT . and the Holy Spirit