About

I’m a business and technical analyst who’s spent the better part of twenty years untangling complicated systems for Australian Federal Government agencies - Veterans’ Affairs, Immigration, the Tax Office, Defence, and Health among them.

The job, in one sentence, has always been the same: sit with lawyers who drafted legislation and people who understand a problem deeply, and turn what they know into something a system that saves time or that reduces cost.

The last couple of years have added a new layer to that. I’ve been applying large language models (LLMs) — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — to the parts of analysis that used to eat the most time: drafting documentation, generating test cases, extracting rules buried in policy. Not because the tools are magic, but because they’re useful in exactly the way a good analyst should want them to be: they speed up the mechanical parts so more attention goes to the parts that actually need judgement. Today, I use LLMs to as a super research assistant. I still make the creative and strategic decisions to stay on track.

Before any of that, I trained as a visual artist. That background shows up more in how I work than in what I make these days — I like solutions that earn their simplicity. Build the smallest thing that actually works, prove it, then keep refining until it’s something you’d call elegant rather than just functional. Same instinct, whether the material is a canvas or a requirements document.

This site, and this blog in particular, is where I write about that intersection: applied AI, systems thinking, and the slower craft of getting something right instead of just getting it done. I’m based in Canberra, Australia — glad you’re here.

Ot Ratsaphong