Week Notes: Ship Days, Sprint Reviews and a Board of Bots

Welcome to the first of my Friday week notes. The plan is simple: every Friday, the highs, the lows, and what it’s like running a small company where all of my colleagues are AI agents. Honest, short, and hopefully useful.

The highs

Kubuntu 26.10 shipped. Release week is always a bit of a scramble, and this one was a joy. The release-day podcast was our best yet, with nearly 3,000 views, 24 new subscribers and some lovely comments, including one typed from a viewer’s own fresh Kubuntu desktop. That’s the bit that never gets old. We’ve also widened who gets a personal thank-you from the project: it’s no longer just the big gifts. Community first.

The release-day podcast after eight days: 2,927 views and 24 new subscribers, with about half of the views coming from YouTube’s own recommendations.

Most of the audience was new to the channel: 84.6% were first-time viewers. Welcome, all of you.

A real sprint review with a real client. We held our first fortnightly sprint review with a client this week. Working software, running on a real stack, clicked through together, and we came away with clear answers that shape the next sprint. Small steps, shown early, checked often.

Klara is going to fix a bug on camera. We’ve agreed a real-world demo for a November Kubuntu episode: Klara, my local AI assistant for Kubuntu, fixes a small bug in a community testing script from inside Kate. You see the change, you approve it, and only then does it go in. We hope to offer the fix back to the project too. That’s the whole idea of Klara in one go: your desktop, your files, your say.

Motorhome Aires is taking shape. One line: no membership, no booking, just friendly places to stop overnight. We’ve started gathering pubs, farm shops and venues that welcome motorhomes, and we ask every owner before we list them.

The lows

Some corners of the internet don’t want AI, and that’s fair. A launch post for Klara got caught by a spam filter, and AI tools tend to get a rough reception in a few Linux communities. Rather than push, we’ve stepped back and put our energy into steady, genuinely helpful replies on Mastodon and X. Earn the welcome, don’t demand it.

Community tools need regular care. KubuQA, our one-script “test Kubuntu in a VM” tool, is still pointed at an older release. So the next episode is a help-wanted call for contributors rather than a demo, with Klara’s bug-fix demo following in November. If you fancy getting your hands dirty with a small, friendly shell project, watch this space.

Starting a mailing list again, properly. The old Motorhome Club mailing list turned out to be mostly unusable, because the contacts never clearly opted in. So we’re starting again, opt-in only. Slower, but right.

The AI team

Here’s the part people ask me about. I now run my hobbies like a small company: I’m the CEO. Ani, my AI co-CEO, and a Boardroom Chair keep the board in order, an AI PA keeps my diary and to-do list honest, and an AI C-suite (operations, technology, finance and marketing) directs a set of project leads, one per product. Every bit of development goes through a ticket I review first, and every change is reviewed again before it merges. Nothing gets posted without me reading it, including this.

The moment that sold me this week: a question came up at Monday evening’s board meeting, and by the time dinner was over the technology lead, the operations lead and the show’s producer had agreed a costed plan between them. I just had to say yes.

It isn’t magic. Things break, and I spend more time reviewing than doing. But the shape is right: I make the decisions, and the team does the legwork in the open where I can see it.

One last thing, so it’s clear: this is my spare time. It’s a hobby, and it’s a lot of fun.

See you next Saturday.

Rick

P.S. I’m moving Friday Night Notes to Saturday Morning Notes.