Aksel N. Edvardsen — 2026

A year with AI.

2026 is my year with AI, a deal I made with myself: a whole year of building, to find out how far it can go.

In 2025 I left my job, travelled a bit and made a slow start. The building only went round the clock from around Christmas.

At least 80 per cent of the time has gone into Mr. World Pool, an analytics platform for international horse racing, and into the model behind it, which sets its own odds on the races. The rest went into side projects, some in the same universe and some just small experiments to see what is actually possible.

GitHub contribution graph for 2026: 2,506 contributions, nearly all from March onwards.
My GitHub contribution graph for 2026, up to early October: 2,506 contributions. I had done a great deal before the green squares begin. I only needed GitHub once something was going live on the web. With Claude Code on top, things really picked up speed from Easter. Most of it is Mr. World Pool and the tools around it. See my profile on GitHub →
The usage overview in Claude Code: 56 sessions, 184,747 messages, 72.9 billion tokens, 112 active days, favourite model Opus 5.5 and a grid of active days.

Claude Code on one machine: 72.9 billion tokens and 112 active days. Mostly the leading models, with a few honourable exceptions. Add a second machine, Astra over the past month and more than six months in Claude chat before this, and 100 billion is a cautious estimate. I don’t think any other way of living would have let me explore AI as freely, or at the same pace.

At API prices that usage would have cost roughly 80,000 dollars. That window for gorging on AI will not stay open much longer, and I have been conscious of it all year. (P.S. I have learned to do things more cheaply too, if need be.)

The main projects

Mr. World Pool

A modern form guide for a market that has stood still for decades.

Everything you need to weigh up a race, in one interface: ratings (one number for how good each horse has shown itself to be), statistics, recent form and machine-learning predictions, for most of the races around the world that matter. Underneath it all is a single rating scale, built on around 250,000 races in 17 countries, from Scandinavia and Britain to Hong Kong, Japan and Australia. So a horse in Hong Kong can be measured against one at Ascot.

For years, my brother and I spent thousands of hours collecting and assessing performances by hand. I've wanted something like this since I was twenty and making my own ratings for Norwegian and Swedish races. With AI as my development partner, I've now built the systems behind it: data collection, quality checks, ratings and form display. The day-to-day running is almost entirely automatic.

Building it was hard work. Winning over a market that has done things the same way since the seventies is harder, so a lot of the work is showing and explaining, and that's where the course and the competitions come in.

Three parts of the same universe:

  • Form

    Live

    The ratings product, and the heart of everything else. Every racecard brings ratings, full form and machine-learning predictions together on one page, all built from scratch with AI as my development partner.

    Mr. World Pool’s dark form card, showing Almaqam’s race history, ratings and form trend

    See a sample →

  • Free competitions on big race days such as Royal Ascot and the Breeders' Cup. Players submit their picks before the races, points are scored automatically when the results come in, and a leaderboard shows who is ahead. The first was Royal Ascot in June 2026. It grew out of competitions I ran on Twitter around the Dubai races for a couple of years. The idea is to make racing fun to follow, for people who don't bet and in races you haven't bet on.

    #TippingComp: the Royal Ascot 2026 leaderboard with podium positions, player names and scores
  • Learn

    In development

    Do Your Homework: an interactive course built around real racecards. A short introduction of six chapters teaches people to read form and assess a race, and the full course of sixteen goes deeper into the method. Learners compare horses and test their judgement in exercises along the way. I made the content, the illustrations and the interactive part myself. The screenshot is from the development version. The course will be free, but it isn't open to everyone yet.

    Do Your Homework in light mode, with the chapter sidebar, progress and The Rating lesson

About the rating methodology I use →

Project Benter

Live

A model that sets its own odds on horse races, and an odds board where I show it at work.

The model builds on the ratings and data from Mr. World Pool. It estimates each horse's chance of winning and turns that into its own odds, which I can hold up against the market. Ask anyone who knows the game and they'll tell you that beating the racing markets is close to impossible these days. That's part of the appeal, and it's the work I'll never quite finish.

Project Benter is how I show the model: an odds board and live streams where I go through races and show the model's prices along the way. It's also practice at something I find less comfortable: standing up and explaining myself.

Project Benter: a Southwell odds board showing estimated win probabilities, fair odds and market comparisons

To Project Benter →

Books and tools

Two stand-alone products that really have one job: bringing the right people into the Mr. World Pool universe and making sure they survive there.

The Long Edge

Live

A manual for people who have decided to take it seriously.

Around 100 pages on value, bankroll, variance, psychology, market structure and sport-specific edges. I wanted everything I've learned in one place, without anecdotes or padding. It's meant to be the one book you read on the subject, not the first of fifteen. It's also a way of building an audience around my work.

The Long Edge: the most boring book about betting you'll ever read

To the book →

Bet Tracker

Live

A spreadsheet that keeps you honest.

A Google Sheets system I've used and refined for years. It tracks Kelly staking, CLV, calibration and return by sport and market, and makes you answer the same review questions every week and month. The point is to measure what actually tells you something over time, such as whether you beat the closing odds, not just wins and losses.

I spent a couple of days getting it ready to sell, though I don't expect a huge market for it. Selling has turned out to be harder than making it.

The Long Edge Bet Tracker: Kelly, calibration, CLV and bankroll in one Google Sheet

To Bet Tracker →

Side projects

Small detours to learn something or try out an idea, and for the fun of it.

Jennys teppe

Live

Mum wanted to try the colours before she started knitting.

My latest project started with my mum, who is 67. She wanted a colour planner for a patchwork blanket she was knitting for her granddaughter Jenny. Less than fifteen minutes later, the first version was online. She could try colours and patterns before picking up the yarn.

The tool lets her colour in the squares, see a knitted preview and save the pattern as an image. It was a tiny first prototype, but the look on her face made me think there must be plenty of people with an idea they'd love some help to build.

That turned into an idea for freelance work: helping small businesses with websites, small apps and other digital tasks, within an agreed scope and budget. The freelance side is still taking shape, but the blanket planner is there to try.

A knitted preview of the Mario pattern in Jennys teppe

Try Jennys teppe →

Digital help for small businesses · in progress (Norwegian) →

Karlove

Live

Editorial letters for early drafts.

This year I'm writing a series of novels. It's what I do when I'm supposed to be relaxing, and I love it. I do the writing itself without AI, but I needed someone who could read closely, be honest and explain why a text works or doesn't.

Karlove is a Claude skill I've filled with notes from a shelf of books on writing. It is as much a writing coach as an editor: it always explains why something works or doesn't, and points to its sources. So the advice rests on more than a chatbot's gut feeling. It never touches the text; it only gives advice.

Karlove in dark mode: “Feedback for your next draft”, with an example note from a draft

To Karlove →

Better Than a CV

In development

A personal page for your job search.

The way recruitment works today, it can be hard to get through to employers who don't know you. And when I've hired people myself, I'd have loved to find something like this about them. Here people can show what it's like to work with them, through words from others, stories and things they have achieved. The core idea is that other people write about you through a link, and you choose what is shown.

Job ads with tightly defined roles can feel a little old-fashioned in 2026, at least in the kind of companies I would like to work for. So the page is as much an invitation to spot possibilities. I'm trying it out on myself as I step up the search for my next employer.

The Better Than a CV front page: "Show what you're like to work with"

See what it looks like →

My own page →

Sun Roulette

Live

Where is the sun, and is it worth going there?

A small, mobile-first tool that spins a roulette wheel of pre-approved holiday destinations. Only places with the forecast on their side for the next couple of weeks make it onto the wheel. The filters take into account where you fly from, how long your holiday is, your budget, how close you want to be to the sea and who you're travelling with.

I built it in three days with Claude Code, purely as a safe trial to get properly comfortable with the tool before I dared let it loose on the holy of holies, Mr. World Pool. Until then, I had been painstakingly careful with every detail there.

It's unlikely to earn much from affiliate links, and I don't plan to spend much time on it. It's a small tribute to ukekalender.no and the other little websites I've enjoyed for years.

Sun Roulette: where is the sun right now? Spin the wheel and find out.

Try it yourself →

Textrodate

Prototype

Dating for people who are better in writing than in a bar.

I think dating apps work poorly, especially for textroverts. Textrodate introduces you to someone and gives you both a little get-to-know-you game: letters, unexpected questions and a picture that slowly comes into focus. Nobody swipes.

It's the least developed of my projects, and I'm not sure I'll take it any further. It was mostly me playing with an idea I liked.

The Textrodate front page in dark mode: “Someone worth writing to”

See the prototype →

What now

I've learned to build, so now I have to learn to sell. It isn't always as satisfying after almost a year at full speed, but the trick is finding a way of doing it that suits me. Patience, I've realised, is probably part of that too.

I've automated enough, and ticked off enough of what I hoped to do this year, that it would sit well alongside a job. That would actually be quite nice. There'd be less pressure for all of it to turn into something quite so fast.

I'd happily work with people who can teach me more about marketing, or who let me carry on as I have been: building, AI and full speed ahead. And I miss being there for people, the way I was for my apprentices and for colleagues and candidates at Ikomm Academy. This year has been fantastic, but the plan was never to stay in my building bubble forever.

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