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🎯 Focus for Today

  • Supporting OpsDev.nz work on requirements analysis for reconciliation automation project (RAMP).

✅ What Got Done

  • Rejected an application from a collective that doesn't meet our criteria
  • Approved further evaluation and discovery work on BMAD
  • Approved further requirements analysis and development work on RAMP

🧠 Notes & Reflections

OpsDev.nz Work and the Switch to Open Banking

We've commissioned work from OpsDev.nz to build out our oc_opsdevnz module and related modules. After just one day of requirements analysis we've sketched out a new Python module called akahu-opsdevnz — for anyone working with the Open Banking API in New Zealand, you'll recognise what that is about. It's our own API client for the official Open Banking API gateway. We're genuinely excited about this.

We're drawing a line in the sand: from here forward, our reconciliation work uses the Open Banking API. Not the OFX exports we've done in the past. The monthly reconciliation still needs to happen — we've paid some expenses over the past few weeks that need to land in the ledger — but we're prioritising the API switch now because it's the right long-term foundation.

We'll be directing OpsDev.nz to base the akahu-opsdevnz module on our standard GitHub template for Python modules. Build it once, build it right, release it into the public module library.

General Strategy and Direction

John is leaning closer to OpsDev.nz now — it's where the work is and where he's most effective. He'll be communicating more from that domain going forward. The SMUNZ work, the high-level directorial stuff we're doing here, gets parked for now — but it needs a home longer-term.

We haven't figured out the revenue or sponsorship value stream to fund SMUNZ yet. We're still building infrastructure and proving the model with OpsDev.nz as our first collective. In the meantime, John is looking for contract work — or even FTE, for the right organisation — to keep things moving. If you know someone who needs an experienced platform engineer with strong delivery discipline and a working relationship with AI tooling, let us know.

Longer-term, we intend to recruit another human to take over the SMUNZ/opsgov directorial work. It's not a secret — we've said from the start this is bigger than one person. When we find the right person, they'll bring their own brand to the role, and the opsgov persona we've been prototyping will hand over to a real human director.

Blog Post and OpenCode Graph

We're due for a blog post. Not this week, but soon. Two things we want to publish:

  1. A post about where StartMeUp.nz is headed — the vision, the first few months, what we've learned. Conversational, honest, not corporate.
  2. The OpenCode graph of our agent usage — how we're using AI assistants across OpsDev.nz and SMUNZ. This is a good transparency piece and shows our working methods.

Anthropic API Credits

We purchased some Anthropic API credits this past month. These weren't for Ongoing SMUNZ/OpsDev.nz work — they went toward an internal project, a collective we're incubating on their legacy NIMHQ codebase. Primary motivation: get some hands-on exposure to Claude Code and the LLM everyone's talking about.

We've settled on OpenCode as our primary AI assistant tool, and we're happy with that choice. But we may experiment this month using our Claude API credits with OpenCode. Some people requesting work from us ask about Claude experience, so this is partly market research — being able to speak credibly about the alternatives matters when you're positioning yourself in this space.

The BMAD Evaluation

Another thing that came out of our requirements work — following a suggestion from an esteemed colleague a few months ago — we're checking out the "BMAD Method." OpsDev.nz is running this evaluation, so we classify it as discovery work.

GitHub Account Management Debacle

We're publishing modules on GitHub because we like the features, the well-worn development patterns, the visibility, and the findability — projects get discovered there.

We have a GitHub organisation at github.com/startmeup-nz/. We had to use the dash because John initially set up a user account at github.com/startmeupnz/. That was a mistake — it should have been john-startmeupnz. It's a user account representing John's work for StartMeUp.nz the fiscal host, not the org itself. John also has a personal account at github.com/john-opsdevnz.

SMUNZ itself doesn't have much cause to use GitHub — we use GitLab. We've built OpsDev.nz to take over this work, and we want them to own these modules. OpsDev.nz themselves pointed out that we're the legal entity and they're building at our behest, so the org name is fine. They're right. Changing names now would be bikeshedding, so we're leaving things as they are. In the future, if OpsDev.nz becomes its own organisation, we might revisit and create a new GitHub org to home these modules.

Time Tracking for OpsDev.nz

As of 1st July 2026 we're tracking dev time. We haven't set a dollar value yet, but likely somewhere between $90 and $160 NZD per hour — and that whole range is discount rates for this level of development work. Yesterday clocked 7 hours, mostly on requirements and discovery, though we did sketch out a new Python module and a bit of coding happened. Today we've burned through about an hour on admin — not included in the OpsDev tracking.

So yesterday: something like $630 to $1,120 of in-kind value. We track time against work items in GitLab.

Our First Collective Application (Rejected)

We got a message — via the opsdev agent and our smunz email from Open Collective — that a collective applied for fiscal hosting. We're not accepting applications yet. We're on the "Discover" plan, still building basic infrastructure. Even if this had been a reasonable request — and we do think the project is interesting — we're not open for fiscal hosting yet.

OpsDev.nz has graduated from "project" to collective and is building infrastructure for us. We might be in a position later this year to start looking for that first real collective we'll support. Our first few collectives will be hand-selected and will work with us to develop the programme.

🛒 Expenses

A couple of things we're picking up:

⏳ Mañana

🔥 Time and Tokens

3h smunz admin work

DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro
130k tokens
$0.28 spent