Companies bring me the technology decisions that are too important to guess at, and too infrequent to justify a full-time hire.
Latest position 28 Aug 2026
Hardening Your Agentic Development Setup: Rules, Permissions, and Tooling
How to harden your agentic development setup with rules-with-reasons, permissions discipline, and disciplined choices about skills and Model Context Protocol servers.
What the work produced
Outcomes
75% faster feature delivery, measured against DORA metrics across a globally distributed team Ligentiatwelve months £25,000 of hardware the business had been told it needed, and turned out not to Small business assessmentone review 0deploys to ship a new report type; report definitions live in configuration, not code Bossie Hurleyplatform build 3months from a blank page to a launched platform for analysing scientific data at scale Sage PublishingMVP stage 1month from no coding experience to a production React application, with mentoring Journalist, self-fundedone engagement
Each figure links to the write-up it came from, including how it was measured. Numbers without a client and a source are marketing, not evidence.
What people call me about
Engagements
Every senior technology decision lands on one person, and that person is running out of hours. Fractional CTO You're weighing an acquisition, and the code is the part nobody in the room can read. Technology due diligence You're scaling faster than the architecture was built for, and you need to know what breaks first. Architecture and security reviews Your engineers are using AI tools, and nobody agreed on what good looks like. Agentic development and AI adoption Your leadership team keeps having the same argument about direction, and it never quite resolves. Technology strategy workshops You have good engineers who've stopped growing, and no one senior enough to pull them up. Engineering leadership development The thing needs building, and standing up a permanent team to build it is the wrong shape. Software development
Clients
Ligentia/ Sage Publishing/ Footasylum/ ghd/ Servita/ Bossie Hurley/ Odondo/ LogTrade/ Packt/ ABM Kitchens & Bathrooms
Billion-pound enterprises and two-person startups, usually at the point where a technology decision has become too expensive to get wrong.
The record
198 pieces since 2019
2026 Writing Hardening Your Agentic Development Setup: Rules, Permissions, and Tooling 28 Aug Writing Slow Productivity: Why Looking Busy Is Costing You Real Output 21 Aug Writing Three Workflows for Agentic Development: Choosing the Right Weight for the Task 14 Aug Writing The Podcasting Years 12 Aug Writing Make Time: Why Focus Is an Energy Problem, Not a Discipline Problem 7 Aug Writing Stop Vibe Coding: The Foundations of Agentic Development 31 Jul Writing Learning to Think Again: Rethinking Lessons from Adam Grant for Technical Leaders 24 Jul Writing “Just Throw AI At It” Is Not a Strategy 17 Jul Writing The Willingness to Have Your Mind Changed: Listening Lessons for Tech Leaders 10 Jul News RJJ Software Returns to Greenhead College to Kick Off Step Into Your Future 2026 9 Jul Writing From Author to Editor-in-Chief: The Shift That’s Already Here 3 Jul Writing The Secret Language of Great Leadership: Lessons from "Supercommunicators" for Tech Leaders 26 Jun Writing Building Psychological Safety in Your Development Team: Practical Strategies for Leaders 19 Jun Writing Start With Why: The One Thing AI Can’t Generate 12 Jun Case study Higher Quality, Shipped Faster: How Ligentia’s Engineering Team Got There With Claude Code 8 Jun