Field notes from a communications career that wandered into AI and started building things. I'm Will Edmonds. What follows is a record of what I've made, what worked, and what it taught me.
everything here is built & shipped ↘
My background is in communications, where the craft underneath everything is clarity: making complicated things understood, and helping people say the right thing at the right moment.
Then AI arrived and started rewriting how that work gets done. I wanted to understand the shift properly, which for me meant building with it rather than forming opinions from a distance. Most of what I make returns to a single question: how information moves, who grasps it in time, and who can afford the tools that were once out of reach.
The work is grounded here in Aotearoa, from local media to government communications to the housing market. Some of it is earnest, some of it is pointed, and all of it is built and shipped.
Selected work, most of it built solo. screens & clips below
A media intelligence platform for New Zealand organisations. One shared corpus of sources and articles, with a separate layer for each client covering topics, alerts and executive briefings. Built API-first, and designed to grow from a single managed client into multi-tenant software.
Status — in development
Affordable AI media training for people who suddenly have to front a journalist. A learn, practice and review loop, with AI interviewer personas grounded in the New Zealand media environment. They respond over voice and webcam, then score the run and hand back coaching notes. Media training used to cost thousands a day.
Status — prototype
A clean, structured archive of every press release on beehive.govt.nz, kept as markdown — mirrored from Marcus Crane's open beehive-markdown project, then indexed and built on. It turns the government's own communications into data you can search, analyse and interrogate. Most of my other ideas start here.
Status — running quietly
Personalised audio stories for young children, generated from a child's name, interests and family. Underneath sits a full audio pipeline: AI narration, music mixed properly, safety filtering, and a parental review step before anything reaches a child. The most technically involved thing I've built, and it runs end to end.
Status — product
A satirical idle game about the New Zealand housing crisis, where you climb from Civilian Scumbag to Housing Minister by being as rotten a landlord as possible. A joke with a serious target, and in its own way the purest example of what communication is for: saying something, and making people feel it.
Status — live & public
MyRefix, a New Zealand mortgage calculator that compares two fixed terms and finds the rate where they break even, and a handful of other tools I made because I wanted them to exist. Not everything needs to be a product.
Status — assorted
Live experiments in how government communication actually works, built from the primary documents: 55,000-odd press releases and a million official information requests. Visit the lab ↗
Political slogans decay. Thirty years of them, measured: when each phrase arrived, when it peaked, and the exact sentence it died in. Run the assay ↗
Clarity is the whole craft, so I scored every press release for reading difficulty and set it as an eye test. It has never been harder to read your own government. Take the test ↗
A field guide to the species of political language, with abundance ratings and real dated specimens. Three species, including the non-apology, have never once been found. Open the guide ↗
How long the government takes to answer when you ask it something, agency by agency, from its own records. Some ministries use all 20 legal days nearly every time. Take a number ↗
Everything the experiments have turned up, one page, every claim carrying its evidence and links to the source documents. Read the notes ↗
more of these than there is time