But that’s changed!

You now have all the tools at your fingertips to plant a seed that, if nurtured, can grow into real positive change.

And it's all down to AI and a bunch of companion tools that are cheap to use.

If you're passionate about something and notice a flaw that needs fixing, you can take it upon yourself to address it. But first, what approach should you choose?

As a software engineer, I always recommend building systems that solve a specific problem. When your system is grounded in a solid foundation, follows best practices, and has the right governance, you’re on your way to creating something measurable that breaks free from the endless “let’s just talk about it” loop, which is a trap many people fall into.

Using AI and AI tools, you can create these systems and get people using them.

Social Issues People Care About

Let’s explore some major issues that many people in the UK would like to see addressed. Of course, you can create your own list based on your passions and decide whether you want to take action on them yourself.

• The NHS is widely seen as being in crisis, with every government vowing to fix it, yet waiting lists remain long. It feels like it’s been “in crisis” ever since the day it began.

• The housing market feels stuck! Renters can’t buy, buyers can’t move up, and it seems like every parent’s generation “had it easier.” Politicians promise hundreds of thousands of homes, but the numbers never quite add up.

• Potholes are driving people mad, councils point to budget woes, and the roads just keep deteriorating. Everyone agrees fixing them is a no-brainer across political divides, yet it still never gets done.

• Immigration is almost always among the top three issues in polls. Every government promises the numbers will drop, yet they usually don’t, and the same arguments resurface every few years.

• Cost of living in “rip-off Britain” feels like a running joke. Energy bills, food, water, broadband, insurance - the constant refrain of “why is everything so expensive here?” has become part of everyday life. Regulators are around, but somehow the bills just keep climbing.

• The trains - late, costly, cancelled, nationalised, privatised, renationalised, yet still late. Passengers grumble, fares climb, timetables stay the same.

• Sewage flows into rivers and the sea, sparking genuine outrage every summer. Water companies get fined, yet dividends keep being paid, and the sewage keeps being dumped.

• NHS dentists are hard to come by—everyone knows someone who can’t get one. Successive contracts have been called in “urgent need of reform,” and they truly do need it.

• The high street isn’t what it used to be. Once charming, it’s now mostly Greggs, vape shops, and charity stores. Councils worry, reports are churned out, and yet another Wilko shuts its doors.

• Crime, particularly the "low-level" tier that's basically been decriminalised in practice.

What you can do about it in the age of AI

If you are passionate enough about something that you want to improve, then you have a couple of options:

• Option 1 - Social Media: Most people use social media to share their perspective on how they would fix problems. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook let people voice their opinions on just about anything, with others free to agree or disagree. But does this really make a difference? Often, not so much; in many cases, it depends on who the driving forces are and what their agenda is! Viewer beware!

• Option 2 - Solutions built using AI: The new 2026 option is to actually build a solution that keeps things real and works towards solving a problem. Create something tangible, test quickly, refine, and adjust to stay in line with your roadmap. If it gains traction, then you are on to something. If it doesn't, then you need to find out why and fix it or stop!

Option 2 is set to grow 100x in the coming years because we are living in an age where even those with minimal experience can create and build a simple solution that attracts a following and generates modest revenue to support itself, which can then be used to bring in expertise and grow the idea into something fit for larger challenges.

For larger social issues there are three cross-cutting principles that anyone can start using:

• The best ideas are built on solid, indisputable data, and not opinions. For ages, campaigns have fallen apart over endless "he said, she said" debates, but data puts an end to that. Thanks to AI, collecting and processing it has never been cheaper or easier.

• The next best are those that handle tedious tasks for people at scale, like filling out forms, writing letters, or filing claims. If claiming £200 takes three hours, most people won’t bother. But if it takes just 30 seconds, everyone will, and the combined cost eventually drives change.

• The third most effective are those that make things visible, like dashboards, maps, or league tables. In Britain, reputation is the most affordable form of enforcement.

What am I doing already?

Yes, I’m already on it. As a test case, I’m developing an app for Colchester Pets and Animal Welfare. The aim is to create a small, revenue-generating app within a CIC to help fund local animal-related good causes. It’s just the beginning, with plenty more ideas in the pipeline. It should take around 50 hours to complete, and once done, it will hopefully bring real benefits to pets and animals in the Colchester area.

I've also created Colchester.Dev for people who want to talk about their ideas and create solutions from them - which can be profit-making to get rich, or solutions that benefit the local or global society.

If you code too slowly, then you blow the budget.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you produce poor design or code, you’re setting the project up for failure.

To win, you have to code fast while keeping it high-quality and well-planned!

AI tools will 10x my productivity! Or will they?

No, not yet, they won’t. AI gives you an edge! It can help you write excellent code in no time!

And this is the promise sold by all the AI coding platforms!

However, you are still needed, and will be for a while yet. The key factor is still experience. A powerful platform can only take you so far, whether it’s AI-based or not. Your own experience still matters a great deal. Those without it may struggle, and for many, that challenge is part of the fun.

If things get too complicated, it might be time to reach out to someone like me who has the experience to help.

AI tools are amazing, offering bursts of productivity that can feel like they multiply your output by ten, but they work only in burst mode. Not exactly a true 10xer style.

This is also why you might start feeling frustrated, even when using tools that seem almost magical. You thought something would take a few days, but a few weeks later, you are still working on it.

It’s time to 10x Yourself, Not Your Coding!

Integrate AI into your entire pipeline so you can act as the quality checkpoint instead of doing all the manual work.

If you really want to become a 10xer, then you need to change more than just the coding tools you use. You need to optimise much more than that, and out-of-the-box tools can’t help you with it (yet).

The problem isn’t the AI tools you have available to you - they are delivering exactly what they promised they would.

The problem is you!

You need to optimise yourself, and up until now, you have had very limited options, and, truth be told, none of them have been really up to the task!

Before AI, my goal was to complete 12 to 15 real tasks per day. Some tasks should have taken 30 minutes, but ended up taking a very annoying 3 hours! But overall, based on my experience, I would mostly expect to hit 12 to 15 tasks a day!

Now we have AI, I’m aiming to complete many more than this, but it isn’t linear because I still only have one brain and one pair of hands!

The answer is to take more from the AI capability set by writing tools for yourself (as a person) and for your productivity workflows.

Connectivity saves the day!

Your time is the issue. So you need to be very careful how you spend it.

Create tools for yourself that do the work on your behalf using APIs, MCP servers, Agent Skills, code execution sandboxes, agent SDKs, and anything else that lets you connect things together, extract data, and build AI-optimised workflows to get the job done.

For example, your customers submit tasks to a project management tool. Using the tool API, you can write a simple Streamlit app that pulls information out of the tool and prepares it for the next step.

Imagine you have 50 tasks waiting for you. Instead of looking at each one, you get AI to review them and to suggest the next steps.

It can signal to you those that it knows what to do with. It can write a plan, review the plan and prepare them so they are ready to go.

Some will need your attention. It will create the questions and update them accordingly based on your answers.

Your job becomes more of a quality checkpoint, either granting permission to move forward or supplying the necessary information before progress can continue.

Injecting this back into your development workflow allows you to carry on as normal.

So, what’s happened here? We now have a highly optimised, repeatable process for handling feature changes, suggestions, bugs, improvements, and anything else your team and customers throw at you, all via this project management tool.

Yes, you end up paying for tokens needed to do this work, but it saves you a ton of time.

This is just one example. The next step is to integrate this with your AI coding method of choice, such as Claude Code, and you will see real, measurable results.

What Next?

The ball’s in your court. I’m creating a variety of tools to optimise my time, and they go far beyond just coding while remaining cheap to operate. My aim is to consistently achieve a tenfold improvement across all my work activities.

You can do the same. It doesn’t even matter if you are a coder or not. You look for what is taking up your time and then look at heavily optimising it.

If you’re not sure where to start, try creating your own time tracker. You could send yourself a text message every 30 minutes between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., use text-to-speech for a quick update, and then log the results. After a few weeks, review the data to see what it reveals. Using just SMS messages to keep things simple (no app needed!)

If you’d rather not build something yourself, you can always use products like RescueTime (I’ve been using it for years, and it’s fantastic!).

Maybe I should create a simple mobile app that offers suggestions for how people can optimise themselves using AI tools and techniques for everyday situations.

What you get

A publishing platform for you or your business. You get a fast website, a blog, a newsletter, an optional member community, and a built in AI assistant trained on your words. The foundation uses Next.js, React, Supabase, Cloudflare, and Vercel. Serious software products run on the same stack. You own the result. Your domain. Your data. Your audience.

At a glance

• You get found in Google and cited by AI.

• Your visitors chat with an AI version of you.

• You own your audience, with a newsletter and members, not rented reach.

• Twelve themes ship with dark mode.

• Security and GDPR pages come ready.

Design and speed

Twelve themes ship, each with a different typeface and a light or dark mode. The theme loads before the first paint, so visitors see no flash of the wrong colours. Visitors switch themes when they want. You write in a rich editor. Upload images. Embed YouTube. Import Markdown from your old blog. Images load from a global CDN, so pages stay fast and score well on Core Web Vitals. Fast pages rank higher and keep readers on the page.

SEO done right

Search engines need structure to rank you. This site gives them structure. Each page ships a clean title, description, canonical URL, and Open Graph and Twitter cards. When an article has no cover image, the site builds a branded share image. Every article ships JSON-LD structured data. Article, Breadcrumb, and an Organization, Person, and WebSite entity graph. The sitemap, robots file, and full text RSS feed update on publish. Google Search Console and Bing verification connect on setup.

GEO, your AI advantage

A new practice sits next to SEO. GEO, generative engine optimisation. GEO gets your site named and linked inside AI answers. Few small business sites prepare for GEO. This one does. The robots file welcomes the main AI crawlers by name. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and more. Your admin and private pages stay blocked. The site publishes an llms.txt file, following the llmstxt.org standard. The file gives language models a clean index of your content. You add questions and answers to an article. The site publishes them as FAQ structured data, the format answer engines lift word for word. Linked Organization and Person data tells AI systems who you are as an entity, beyond the text on one page. Ask an AI about your field, and the AI finds your site ready to quote.

The AI chatbot

Every site ships an AI assistant in the corner. Visitors talk to an AI version of you or your business. The assistant reads your published articles and a persona you write in the admin. So the assistant answers in your voice, from your facts. The assistant streams replies, runs on Claude, and matches your site theme and dark mode. Publish a new article, and the assistant learns the new content with no manual step. The assistant takes one safe action. When a visitor wants to meet, the assistant shows a short form. The visitor fills in their details. You get the request by email. Guardrails keep you safe. The assistant declines off topic questions. The assistant invents no prices and makes no promises. The assistant resists manipulation and shows a clear disclaimer. Each conversation costs cents. You set a hard spending cap. You pay for no second subscription.

Own your audience

Social platforms change their rules without warning and show your posts to fewer people. A direct audience protects you. You get a real newsletter. Visitors subscribe with double opt in. You send broadcasts on your schedule. You manage subscribers and export them to CSV. The newsletter runs on Resend, with managed unsubscribe built in. Readers create accounts, comment, and like your articles. You moderate with admin tools. You see views, top content, and subscriber growth in a simple analytics view. Every article you publish does three jobs. Ranks in search. Adds to what the AI assistant knows. Grows a list you own.

Secure and low cost

The unglamorous parts work properly. Row Level Security restricts data access inside the database. Cloudflare Turnstile blocks bots on every public form. Rate limits and content sanitisation stop abuse and injection. Your privacy, cookie, and terms pages edit from the admin. A cookie consent flow ships ready. Running costs stay low and predictable. The build sits on generous free and low cost tiers.

Who buys this

This fits people who publish, or know they should. Consultants. Coaches. Founders. Freelancers. Creators. Local businesses. Professionals building authority in a niche. You write helpful content. The platform turns each piece into search rankings, AI citations, an owned audience, and booked work.

Proof you check yourself

This website runs the platform you are reading about. The speed, the structured data, the assistant, and the newsletter ship to your site too. You check the claims here, on this page. The assistant in the corner is the live product. View the page source and read the structured data. Open the llms.txt file at the site root. Read the AI crawler list in the robots file. The build uses named tools and open standards like Schema.org and llmstxt.org. You verify the work, you do not take my word.

Cost and setup

I set up the site for you, on your domain, branded for your business, ready to publish. The setup runs fast, not over months. Pricing starts at £2000. I build each site to your requirements. The price covers a one off setup plus low monthly running costs. You add more features as you need them. Ask the assistant for a quote. I offer ongoing support.

Common questions

Do you need to be technical? No. You write. The platform handles the rest.

Want your old blog moved over? Import Markdown.

Who owns your data? You do. Domain, data, and subscriber list.

What are the monthly running costs? Low. The build targets free and low cost tiers.

Is your data safe and GDPR ready? Yes. Row Level Security, bot protection, and editable legal pages.

Start here

Every month you wait, AI answer engines cite someone else in your field. Start now, and you build this history before your competitors. Wait a year, and you begin from zero while they get quoted. Want a website found by people and AI? Open the chat in the corner now and ask the assistant to set up a call. The chat shows you the product working. Prefer email? Write to hello@marcallington.com. Build for the internet arriving now. Found by people. Cited by AI. Owned by you.

Think about the last time you needed a supplier. A web developer, an accountant, a sign writer, someone to fix the thing that broke at the worst possible moment. If you didn't know the right person already, you went to Google, or you asked in a Facebook group, or you hired someone off a national platform who you'll never meet. I've done all three. I've paid firms on the other side of the world for work I could have handed to someone twenty minutes down the road.

I want something better, I want to be a part of an online business networking community built to help connect people together.

So what is Colchester.Network?

Colchester.Network is an online business community and local marketing platform for owners in and around Colchester (within 20 miles to be precise!). You join, you get a profile, and you can find, message, and work with other local businesses in one place. It's members only, and we prefer quality over quantity - and will not hesitate at booting out people who want to spam, troll or be annoying!

Is this for you?

Yes, if you run a business within about twenty miles of Colchester. Most members fit one of three groups.

• You work on your own and want to be a part of the local business community.

• You're growing, and you need trusted local suppliers, partners, or your first hire.

• You're good at what you do, and you'd rather earn warm referrals than cold pitch for work.

If one of those sounds like you, keep reading.

What you get out of it

It's new, so I won't point you at a wall of success stories just yet, but we have to start somewhere! I want it to grow quickly, so we will be running advertising campaigns to attract new members.

Soon, it can win you work. You list what you offer and what you're looking for, and other members do the same. Say you fit bathrooms. A member who runs a letting agency needs a plumber she can call again and again. She finds you in the directory, or someone who has used you puts you in touch. That's one relationship that can feed you work for years. The more you show up and the more people see what you do, the more they come to know and trust you.

It saves you time. You will be part of the local business community that is more responsive to other local businesses than on other platforms.

It cuts your costs. Advertising across Colchester is limited and expensive, and most of it drops you into a pool with the rest of the world, which pushes the price up. When work comes to you through the network, you lean on paid ads less. When you hire through the network, you skip the recruitment fee, which for a local hire runs into four figures. When you need a
service, you go to someone local first.

Running a business involves making a series of decisions that only the owner can make. Here, you can share those decisions with people who have already faced similar challenges.

What's inside

A quick look, not a full inventory.

• A business profile that other members find when they search the directory for your sector.

• A member directory you filter by what people do and whether they're open to work.

• Discussion spaces to ask a question, share a win, or post local news worth knowing.

• An opportunity board for what you need and what you offer, plus referrals you can pass to other members when you hear of work.

• Direct messages with no connection requests, and warm introductions, so you can put two members together who ought to know each other, or get introduced yourself.

• An events calendar that keeps local and member events in one place.

• A five-minute Monday digest, so you stay current without checking a feed all week.

• A weekly Member Spotlight that puts a different member in front of the whole network.

You can hire through the network and flag yourself as open to work, so a local role reaches local people first. Business challenges, where members work towards a shared goal together, are arriving over the coming weeks.

How is this different from LinkedIn, a Facebook group, or BNI

I started Solve with Software in 2012, and like everyone else I ended up on the big platforms. LinkedIn mostly. The trouble with LinkedIn is scale. You're one voice among hundreds of millions, buried under strangers posting two-sentence AI answers that don't even sound human.

A free Facebook group is the other trap. No profiles, no directory, no opportunity board, and nobody keeping it clean, so it fills up with spam and chancers. Colchester.Network works the other way round. No algorithm deciding who gets seen. No ads. Everyone here is a local owner who has paid to join, and that small fee is what pays for the moderation and keeps the cold-pitchers out. It's local, so people tend to know people, or know someone who does.

It isn't BNI either. No 7am meetings, no weekly attendance, no quota of referrals. You show up when it suits you. At last, somewhere to build proper relationships with other local businesses without getting lost in a global feed. A town-sized room of people who share your high street beats that feed every time you want real work done with real people.

Who's behind it

Me. I'm a Colchester business owner and software developer, and I built this because I wanted it for myself. Before I wrote a line of code, I talked to a stack of local owners about the idea. They told me the same thing, over and over. They'd use it, and a proper local network would be worth having.

I run it day-to-day, answerable to the members who pay for it rather than to advertisers. Your data stays in the UK, it's GDPR-compliant, and I don't sell it. What you post stays inside the community, for members, not scattered across the open web.

What it costs

£9.95 a month, or £95 a year. You start with a 14-day free trial. Your card goes in when you sign up, the first charge is on day 15, and if it's not for you, you cancel in a couple of clicks. No lock-in, no exit fee, no awkward phone call.

"But it's new, I'm busy, and I'm not a salesperson"

Fair. Three honest answers.

It's new, so yes, it's small today. The aim is a few hundred local owners by September, and the people joining now are the founding members. They get the first relationships and a real say in where this goes. That's the case for joining early, not against it.

You're busy. You don't need to live in here. Five minutes with the Monday digest keeps you in the loop, and you drop in when something's relevant to you. You're not a salesperson. Good, because this isn't about pitching. Answer the odd question, share what you're working on, let people see your work. The selling looks after itself once
people know they can trust you.

How to join

Start your 14-day free trial at [colchester.network](https://colchester.network). You set up your profile, post a quick hello, and you get a few suggested members worth talking to. Five minutes, and you're in. I'll see you there.

So competence isn't the edge any more. AI means everyone has it now. The edge is whether you've got a process that turns out good work every time, and whether you can build it into a habit. That's what I'm doing. I run a business, and I've never found time to create content. I enjoy it, but it always slides down the priority list. My fix was to solve the problem with a three-step process, then repeat that process for every piece I write until it becomes a habit.

The three steps:

• Content rubrics

• Structure and Q&A

• Make it useful

I've put time into this because several of my projects have a real need for it. My customers have to produce hundreds of pieces of content a month. By hand, the cost would be absurd, and they don't have the hours anyway. So they follow my process, and it works for them.

This article is the proof. It took 20 minutes to write this way, it runs to over 800 words, and it should hand you something you can use with your own AI today. I've left out some of the nuts and bolts, but there's enough here to go and experiment. If you want more, ask me.

1. Content rubrics

This is the step most people don't know they're missing. You get handed a title and a summary, and off you go. But something's absent. You've no way to measure whether the article hits its goal and connects with the right people.

Decide what good looks like before you write a word. Skip that and the whole thing is hit and hope. You judge the draft against whatever the AI hands back, which is always plausible, and plausible reads fine. It also tends to say nothing. You won't catch it, because you've nothing to hold it against. So you shuffle a sentence, cut a line, swap a word, and never know whether you're improving the piece or just poking at it.

Write the standard down first. Who it's for. What it has to do for them. What makes it credible. What it must never do. For a piece like this one, the rubric says it has to make sense to someone who's never written a word with AI, it can't drift into jargon, and every claim has to be something I'd defend out loud. The more specific you get, the more use it is, to you and to the AI you hand it to.

People skip this because it feels like admin before the real work starts. It's the opposite. The rubric kills off the three rounds of editing where you fiddle with words and can't say why. I've shipped pieces without one. They read fine and landed flat.

One thing worth saying: you need a rubric for every audience and every format. I keep separate ones for articles, landing pages and LinkedIn posts.

2. Structure and Q&A

Build the outline you want the article to follow. Fill it with the questions and answers the piece should be built on. Use that to write the draft, then measure the draft against your rubric. Add the things AI can't know: your testimony, your examples, your outcomes. I run a knowledge base to speed up the personal bits, because once it's populated, I can reuse it, and AI is good at surfacing relevant material I'd have skipped.

Then get AI to write it with a strong humanising prompt. You can feel the default AI voice inside a sentence or two. The rhythm's too even. The sentences come out the same length, the paragraphs weigh the same, everything lined up like fence posts. Most readers can't name what's wrong, but they sense it, and they trust you a little less.

Fixing it comes down to rules. Vary the sentence length. Cut the filler. Make it commit to a point instead of hedging around it. Hand it the list of tells to drop: em dashes scattered everywhere, the "not just this, but that" tic, the leverage-and-seamless vocabulary, three adjectives doing one adjective's job. Once it knows what to avoid, it mostly stops.

We want to humanise the text, but we are not going to chase our own tail trying to get a high humanise score because, to be frank, you may as well just invest the time in writing it yourself from scratch; it would probably be faster. Instead, we want to create content quickly that reads well and delivers on its goals. If you have time, you love to write, and you are good at it, then write, write, write.

This isn't about tricking anyone into thinking a person wrote it. Machine prose is harder going, people give up on it faster, and that's the real reason to reach 80%. Nobody likes AI slop.

3. Make it useful, not more SEO-ish

By now the piece is good. Don't start cramming keywords in. What ranks in 2026, and what AI assistants pull from when someone asks them a question, is whatever's most useful. The page that answers the question best wins. Keyword stuffing died years ago, and the search engines and the AI tools now want the same thing you should want anyway: the most helpful answer going.

So find the gaps. It takes one prompt. Ask the AI what a reader would still be wondering after the last line. Where you raised something and walked off without dealing with it. What example would turn a vague point concrete. Where a sceptic would push back. Half the time the answer's obvious the second you see it, and you'd have missed it on your own. AI reviews well when you give it clear rules to review against.

None of this asks you to be a gifted writer. It never did, and now it matters even less. What separates good content from the forgettable kind in 2026 is a process, and a process is something you control. So if you're not creating content regularly, it's not your writing holding you back. It's that you haven't built a process you can repeat, and turned it into a habit.

My results

I use this for everything written on this site. You'd struggle to find the seam between what came out of my head and what came from AI, and I'm happy with that. I'm a developer, so of course I've built my own rubric generator, knowledge base, Q&A generator and review analyser. I've even thought about turning it into a small hosted tool people could use. You don't need that, though. ChatGPT or Claude will do the job. It's more manual that way, and still far quicker than writing and reviewing every word by hand.