Australian again, with a knowledge base doing the legwork
Some people who know me, know that I'm actually born in Australia. Devonport, Tasmania, in 1990 to be precise. My family left for Denmark at five, and I have been Danish since 1995. On 21 September the Department of Home Affairs approved my application for evidence of Australian citizenship. For years I assumed the Australian part was gone.
One case, one knowledge base
This involved a fair bit of work, but I'm proud to say I didn't really do much. Claude did the legwork and Contextbox held the case. Contextbox is the knowledge base we're building at Heivol. I had tried this before in 2023, but found the work tedious and heavy in process, so my motivation died with it. In June I then decided on a different approach and put everything into one project on Contextbox. Scans of old passports, my parents' papers, the unsent 2023 form, and a task file.
Every session Claude started by searching the KB and reading the task file, and ended by writing back what had changed. So I never had to explain my family tree to it twice, even with weeks between sessions. The task file is about 30 KB now, mostly checkboxes, receipts and dead ends. I never had to formulate an e-mail. I never had to fill out a form either. I will admit to having reviewed all of it - those applications aren't free after all.
It got the law wrong first
It also got the law wrong first, which matters if you're thinking of trying this. Claude's opening theory rested on my mum's Danish naturalisation taking effect 18 days after Australia dropped the old rule that cost you your citizenship if you took another one. Very tidy. The next day it read the scan of her Australian certificate from the KB and flagged that she'd only become a citizen seven months after I was born, so none of that applied.
The real basis was a 1988 letter from the Australian embassy in Copenhagen granting both my parents permanent residence. Same answer, different paper, and I'm still a bit uneasy about how convincing the wrong version read.
The form
Before touching ImmiAccount, Claude wrote a file in Contextbox called
form119-prefill.md, with every Form 119 field mapped by label to
an answer and the document it came from. Then it filled in the application
in my browser, page by page, reading from that file. Some fields required
data in specific formats. Claude wrote each of those into the file as it
hit them.
My part was logging in with MFA, uploading the scans (the browser tooling can't touch file upload fields), paying, and getting a friend who's an Australian citizen to endorse my photo (thanks Sarah Kilgariff, you're a true friend). It stopped at the declaration page and left the signing to me.
Donaldson, or Petersen
I lodged on 4 August. Two days later Home Affairs sent a request for information with a seven-day deadline: I'd applied as Donaldson. My birth certificate says Petersen, and for someone born in Australia, a Danish marriage certificate doesn't prove a name change. Unlucky me. It had to be registered with Births, Deaths and Marriages in Tasmania.
Claude drove that portal too. The first attempt timed out after 30 minutes idle while I was watching YouTube videos about guys eating large quantities of food, while simultaneously making food. Have you seen Zermatt Neo do his thing? - Amazing. I'd go as far as calling that guy an athlete. The second attempt Claude did went through the same day, and it wrote the letter asking Home Affairs to hold the file until the Tasmanian certificate came.
Funny thing is, the name thing had already bitten me once. A backup birth certificate I'd ordered in June sat at the parcel shop for two weeks and then went back to Hobart. The parcel was addressed to Petersen, and PostNord sends the pickup notice to whoever is registered there, so that's probably what never happened.
After that it put mailbox checks in my calendar every Monday and Thursday, because people who know me will know me for being forgetful. I managed to forget a family get-together and friendly hang in the span of a week, so there is very recent evidence of this. Adrian Hegedues likes to remind me on a regular basis. I should probably prioritize making calendar tooling better, but I'll likely forget.
The Tasmanian certificates arrived on 15 September. I re-lodged with 15 attachments on the 16th and the approval came five days later.
Why the wrong theory didn't stick
Back to the mum citizenship and residency for a second, because it's really cool. It got caught because her certificate was already sitting in the KB when the reasoning needed checking. Ideally it would catch it first, but honestly who cares? - What was cool was its ability to quickly investigate and pivot, because I would likely have just left it there.
What's next
The certificate itself is in the post, roughly six weeks to Denmark. Then the embassy for a passport, and my son's application for citizenship by descent, which depends on this one. Our passport photos expire in early December, so that's the next deadline.
While I built the Contextbox tool to hold the knowledge and had help from friends and family, a lot of credit still has to go out to the people at Anthropic. Without your tools' ability to handle long-running tasks, I would never have been able to enter the upper echelon of multi-citizenship society. I'd like to think that despite being a citizenship noble, I will remain approachable and down to earth, but power corrupts. Will it go to my head? - I've been too cheap to buy an office chair since I moved into where I live now and I've taken to dance by my desk at intervals to spare my back, so I think I'll be fine.
All in all, this is a pretty cool thing that I would never have done without the tooling available. Upon all of this reasoning, it even highlighted that I might qualify for a Philippine citizenship as well, so who knows, maybe there'll be another article at a later point? - Also, for those curious, I think I used 2-3 sessions on the whole ordeal, so not really that much.
The case ran on Contextbox, the same knowledge base we run Heivol out of. Questions about any of it, write to [email protected].