Going back to full time, Claude control words and more – freelancers meet up on 27th May 2026
Posted by Paul Silver
On 27th May, thirteen freelancers got together in the Battle of Trafalgar pub in Brighton to talk tech, handling clients, and a fair amount of random nonsense. This is some of what we talked about:
- Getting access to APIs
- Panel interviews – good or bad?
- Successful payment chasing
- ULTRATHINK (Claude control word)
- How much are Anthropic subsidising Claude use?
- The differences between Microsoft and Anthropic’s billing models
- Using /compact to reduce your Claude context and avoid context window overflow
- Going back to full time employment
- Drupal security update
- Robot vacuum fight club in Brighton Fringe
- AI bros hunting for easy passive income
- The limitations of LLM AIs
- Monty Python
- Sailing trip completed
- Formula 1 & Formula E
- Ferrari Luce electric car
Chasing payments
It is no fun chasing unpaid money and it was great to hear from someone who had been pursing a client for money they were owed and succeeded in getting paid. Perseverance when chasing money is key – if you’re not used to it the whole situation can get very emotional and difficult. There’s some advice about chasing payments in this recent thread on the Freelance UK part of Reddit
Going back to full time employment
As someone who has been freelance a very long time and has been running a weekly networking group for freelancers for over twenty years, people are often a bit nervous when telling me they’re looking to move from freelancing to full time employment. My view on this is: you do what you’ve got to do to keep going in life. The freelancing market in tech has been very difficult for about three years, by far the longest I’ve known it to be bad. You’ve got to pay your bills and if freelancing just isn’t working for you and you can find a full time job, bloody go for it!
Although there’s ways to make sure you’ve always got enough work coming in to keep going as a freelancer, it’s important to remember there’s also a dollop of luck involved too. Sometimes your luck is bad and you get several clients cancel work or have problems themselves and all your work disappears and there’s not enough in the pipeline, and you just can’t tie enough projects together fast enough to not run into financial trouble yourself. Or, you just get burnt out on juggling all the things you need to as a freelancer – doing your work, doing marketing, comms with prospective clients, comms in general, keeping your accounts roughly up to date, etc – and want a simpler life where you get to concentrate on your work during the day and that’s it. Sometimes health issues mean you need a more straightforward life.
If you’re looking for full time work at the moment, good luck! If you’re looking to leave employment for freelancing, good luck as well! Just get on with what you can get on with and have as good a life as possible.