Vol 2, Issue 14 | Apr 08 2026
What about everything we learned? (Free Edition)
Hey there,
What about everything we learned?
Last week we sent the shutdown email for MyCityZen.
It was a small product, but there was nothing small about what sat underneath it. On the surface it looked like a chatbot — you asked a question, it answered — but the thing doing the answering was a routing layer over nearly thirty specialist agents, each one stitched to a knowledge base that a few hundred expats and locals had been correcting and expanding with us for a year. NIE renewals and residency cards. Autónomo tax obligations and the annual reckoning with Hacienda. Sistema Nacional de Salud enrolment. Tenant rights and the specific flavour of landlord nonsense you only meet in Spain. The lighter stuff was there too — school calendars, English-speaking dentists, how to book swimming lessons when the council website is only in Valencian — but the load-bearing material was the bureaucracy nobody writes guides about, because the guides go stale the week they publish and the rules keep moving.
The decision to wind it down had been creeping steadily for a while. The underlying platforms we’d built it on were changing API and pricing models. Getting anywhere with local government was (not so surprisingly) slower than swimming uphill in treacle. The product itself had never quite found the shape that paid for the time it took to maintain. So after we agreed to close it, there was the question that followed:
What about everything we learned?
The knowledge in MyCityZen wasn’t trivial. It was nearly a year of community questions, tested answers, write-ups corrected three times over by people who actually live the thing they were describing. The product was small. What sat underneath it was not. And all of it was locked inside a container that wasn’t going to be around much longer — available only to people who knew MyCityZen existed and had a reason to be inside it.
Mourn it, or lift it out
The instinct when something ends is to mourn it. Maybe write a postmortem and screenshot the dashboard before it goes dark. Then move on, and quietly accept that the work disappears with the container that held it.
The better instinct (which I borrowed from someone else) is to ask a different question: what part of this is separable from the container, where can I put it so it survives, and can I put it somewhere more people can reach it than reached it here?
The someone else is Stefano Amorelli, an Italian engineer who built estonia-ai-kit — a set of tools that let an AI assistant talk directly to Estonia’s government APIs. Estonia is one of the most digital countries on earth — e-Residency, three-minute tax filing, the whole thing. Stefano’s project felt natural for Estonia.
Spain is famously…well…not Estonia. Spain has a fax machine in the local police station. Nearly every interaction with the state involves three trips to a different building — each on a different day, each with a slightly different form and each with a different required ritual for appeasing whatever mad god is overseeing the celestial whirling of Spanish bureaucratic processes at the time.
And yet — a lot of the information is sitting in there, freely available to the public domain in the form of APIs. The Instituto Nacional de Estadística has been publishing real numbers in a format software can actually read for years. The Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) publishes every current Spanish law as a free feed that almost nobody uses. AEMET, the weather agency, will hand you forecasts and fire-risk data if you ask it nicely. The Catastro, Spain’s land registry, has every plot of land in the country sitting behind a free API.
Isn’t that the original promise of the Internet — all of the world’s data, accessible behind your screen? And isn’t that the promise of AI — that abstracting and interacting with that data is nearly automatic?
It’s never been easier to put these things together.
What’s in the full issue
This week’s paid edition picks up from exactly here. It tells you what I built to lift the MyCityZen knowledge out — where it lives now, who can reach it, and why the platform we’d been paying to host the old version suddenly had nothing left to hold.
It also tells the second story that landed in the same week. On March 31st, Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code, and within days my feed filled with posts promising to reveal the “secrets” hidden inside — three or four patterns dressed up as insider knowledge, sold back to readers with the borrowed authority of someone who’d read the source. The awkward part is that none of those patterns were ever secrets.
Both stories ended up asking the same question from opposite directions, and the answer in both cases was the same. The paid issue walks through the practical moves you can make in your own AI setup today — the ones currently being repackaged as “leaked secrets” — without reading a line of Anthropic’s source code.
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Until next time,
Jim