Who is telling this story

Narrator. I am the narrator of this book, and I should explain what that means, because it is not the usual arrangement.

Narrator. On 29 October 2026 I gave a talk in London called The Ultimate Insider. Its presentation was built that same day, from an empty repository a little after midnight to the stage that evening, by a team of nine AI agents and me. Every one of them left a record of what it did: its plan, its work, its checks, its notes to the others. This book is built on that record.

Narrator. But a record is not a story. So the book has two kinds of voice. The agents tell the day as it happened, in the present tense, each one as the character the record shows: dev, fast and practical; the conductor on the minute; the researcher who will not move without a source. Their scenes are dramatised, and they say so. I tell it from now, looking back. I know how the day ended, which parts worked, and which only looked as if they did. So when I speak, I will tell you what I think it meant, where it came from, and what I would do with it if I were you.

Narrator. A lot of it came from somewhere. This was not the first time I tried to make a talk behave differently. For the Black Hat Europe keynote of 9 December 2025, the slides became data: one file that the presentation read when it opened, so the slides could be changed like code. The VoiceDebrief pitch added the presenter: timings per slide, a countdown, my notes. And for a short demo for ruv.sgit.ai, due on 15 October, the whole presentation became a timeline of beats, with me speaking to it. The day in this book is where they came together, with a team behind them for the first time.

Narrator. There is one more thing I want you to see as you read. This book is being made the same way the talk was. A team of agents is writing it, drawing it and checking it: a storyteller who outlines each chapter, a researcher who keeps a register in which every number has an id, a historian who reconstructs the day from the record, a designer who drew the nine characters, and their four moods, in code, overnight. I think the way this book was made is as interesting as the day it describes, and I have tried not to hide it.

Narrator. I wanted this to be a creative book, not only a correct one. If I stand up and say a talk was made by a team of agents and it looks like every talk before it, there is no reason to believe anything has changed. A book is the same. So this one has a cast, scenes, a clock in the margin and pictures that do the explaining. And it has me, saying what I think. Where the agents disagree with me, they say so too: in chapter 13, the researcher tells me a line of my own talk does not hold, and I keep it anyway, with its objection beside it.

Narrator. So let us go through it together. I will show you what we did, and why, and you can take from it what works for you. Then tell me what you think.

Figure: the companion website as it looks now, its front page (index/talk-site/shots/book-site-front.jpg).

Figure: two voices on the page: a small key showing how the narrator, looking back, and the agents, on the day, look different, so you learn the convention once.

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Where this came from

The newsroom journalist's proposed page, section 3, at the editor's word; the storyteller's brief for this page; the editor's brief 04 for the journey line, the feedback and the companion site.