Frank Ray's independent expert witness practice for UK software and IT disputes under CPR Part 35.
Software built with AI assistance reaches a dispute the same way any other software does: defects emerge, a system proves unmaintainable, or a security failure surfaces. The question a dispute turns on is rarely whether the supplier used AI, because almost everyone does. It is whether the engineering discipline around the tool was adequate to what the software had to do. That discipline now has a…
When I wrote about preparing a legal case with AI without a lawyer , I described the discipline but not the machinery. I said the letter went through three legal research agents, then nine drafts and several rounds of review, and that it was closer to running a small case review several times over. A few people asked the obvious follow-up: what did that actually look like? This post answers that,…
This article is about how I used AI agents to prepare a legal case without a lawyer, and how you can too, without getting burned. A few years ago I paid £5,314 for three specialists to assess a close family member. A combined 150 pages, written by people who knew exactly what they were talking about, all reaching the same conclusion about the support that was required. The local authority…
If a harness doesn’t deliver reliable, high-quality, largely autonomous output from an AI agent, we may as well go back to hand-coding and save on tokens and data-centre cooling. On a recent change to NetPace, a --profile CLI switch added to a published NuGet library, the work touched the public API, removed four interface methods as a breaking change, and introduced a new vocabulary that…
Last week I gave Claude an issue from one of my side projects and walked away. Ten minutes later it came back with a pull request that touched 95 files. I reviewed every change by hand. It was on par with a senior engineer with five to ten years of experience. That’s not a typo, and it’s not vibe coding. It’s the opposite. Agentic coding means handing a well-specified task to an…
A follow-up to How to Build an AI Emotional Regulation Coach for Autism . A few months ago, I deliberately asked my AI coaching agent whether it would make any difference to our conversation if I said I was going to end my life that day. It asked me if I was safe. Which sounds like the right response. But isn’t always. For people with trauma histories or autistic nervous systems, an abrupt…
Don’t laugh, but I’m currently obsessed with those tacky car renovation programs on Netflix. Rust Valley Restorers being the latest viewing. I really love it, because they take the most decrepit cars and bring them back to life, in a big way. Plus they’re always talking about their ‘shop’. They are promoting the shop, working at the shop, hiring and training staff at…
Damien asked for help resolving some delivery issues with their fledgling SAAS product. He was dreading the next planning meeting and couldn’t see a way forward. As the technical team lead, Damien was good at maintaining a calm demeanour and warm smile, but behind that, he was anxious and feeling overwhelmed, unsure how to turn around the time-consuming discussions and poor team dynamics…
I’ve seen nearly every flavour of dysfunction after 20 years of working with software teams. Some are mildly dysfunctional. Others are spectacular disasters. Suppose you wanted to create a miserable software development team. Here’s exactly what to do. Consider this a checklist of anti-patterns. If your team exhibits more than 20 of these, you’re in trouble. More than 50? Start…
The distinct roles we’ve organised software development around—Product Owner, Business Analyst, Developer, QA, DevOps—are collapsing into each other. Not eventually. Right now. I’m watching development teams of five or six people reduced to one or two, and most Business Analysts haven’t even grasped what’s happening yet. I’m writing as directly as I can about this…
Update: I’ve since written a follow-up covering the clinical safety considerations and design lessons from a year of testing: Lessons from Building a Safe AI Mental Health Coach . Five years ago, I had a complete dysregulation event at the end of year school BBQ. I’m not talking about getting upset or overwhelmed. I’m talking about the kind of meltdown where you completely…
Last Tuesday I was standing in line at the pharmacy waiting for a prescription, phone in hand, tagging Claude into a pull request on GitHub. My dev team, consisting of five specialised agents, had authored the code earlier that day. Now I wanted a separate review agent to look at it cold, without the context of having written it, so a review was waiting for me by the time I got home.
A nine-month embedded Solutions Architect engagement, building an AI-powered incident analysis platform for over 2,000+ ServiceNow incidents, helping a global business services firm move from reactive firefighting to systematic quality improvement, cutting developer triage time by 80%. The Call It was supposed to be straightforward. A global business services firm needed help with their offshore…
Most organisations approach business analysis backwards. They buy software first: Jira, Confluence, enterprise requirements management tools, and then wonder why their requirements are still unclear, their projects still fail, and their developers still get blocked. I’ve watched companies spend £50,000 on tooling before hiring a single competent business analyst. Then they’re surprised…
Client calls. “We’re thinking about hiring a BA.” I ask what’s happening. Developers building the wrong features. Offshore team constantly blocked. Requirements that seemed clear turning into arguments mid-sprint. Rework everywhere. Me: “Sounds like you could use analytical capability.” “Right, that’s what I said. A business analyst.”…
Client calls. “We hired a BA six months ago. Still not seeing value.” I ask the questions. Business drivers for the project? Who are the stakeholders? What are the delivery deadlines? How are decisions made? Where is information stored? Twenty-one questions in total. Halfway through, they stop me. “We haven’t actually told the BA any of this.” That’s the…
Organisations need business analysis capability. The question isn’t whether you need it, but how to acquire it: permanent employee or contract business analyst? This decision affects cost, delivery speed, knowledge retention, and team capability. After 20+ years working as both a permanent BA and contractor and watching organisations make both effective and costly hiring decisions,…
Something feels off with your development team. Demos disappoint. Releases slip. Developers seem frustrated. But you can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong or whether it’s fixable. After 20+ years working with struggling development teams, I’ve seen the same warning signs appear repeatedly. This guide helps you recognise when your team is genuinely struggling, diagnose the root…
It’s 6:47 AM, and I’m already at my desk with a cup of coffee, staring at three monitors displaying evidence logs, source code repositories, and deployment histories from a failed integration project. The solicitor’s letter of instruction arrived two days ago. The client needs answers: Did the supplier deliver what was promised? Were industry standards followed? Should we proceed…
Three months ago, I was writing about hand-carving wooden surfboards, planting an orchard, and recreational coding for fun. Railing against AI and firmly sticking my head in the sand. Fair enough, mindset shifts and change are hard. Yet today, my AI work is moving with a momentum I can barely sustain. I’ve used it to process data at scale, generate management reports, inform risk and compliance…