Just a quickie based on a few chats I’ve had recently. I get asked about how I use AI day-to-day (for “non-dev work”) fairly regularly, and the same thing happens almost every time: I start explaining the stuff I think is cool, like agent personas, layered memory files, deterministic sync scripts - and eyes usually glaze over. But if I mention that my AI briefs me on my day every…
There’s no shortage of prominent people talking about how the shape of software teams is changing. Middle management is getting thinner and more technical. Managers are getting back on the tools. Product and design folks are building things themselves. And engineers are increasingly expected to own more of the lifecycle (usually implicitly), rather than one well-defended slice of the…
Like many of you (even the ones who won’t admit it), I have a bad habit of scrolling Instagram for a bit when I wake up. I “fixed” it by doom scrolling X and LinkedIn instead. Genius move - apparently reading about strangers shipping side projects at 5am (lol, make that 7:45) makes you feel measurably worse than watching Insta-slop-reels. The grind Over the past 2-3 years…
TL;DR We taught the machine to write by feeding it our writing, and now that it sounds like us, sounding like ourselves gets us flagged as “AI generated”; so we contort our voice to prove we are human, and lose the thing that makes our voices ours. Why write? I like writing, mainly for myself as a way to force deeper thinking about a topic I’m interested in, but also to maybe…
This weekend the weather was a bit crap, so no golf. As a result I caught up on some reading. I read Martin Fowler’s June Fragments which had a number of good posts, but one in particular got the thinking-juices flowing; Jamie Hurst’s blog post about AI-assisted engineering from his perspective as a Principal Engineer. I enjoyed his take, and it mirrors what I’m seeing in an…
It’s fifteen years ago (bear with me, I’ve been in this industry since the late 90s, most of my good stories start this way), and you’ve got two senior developers at a SaaS company. One of them writes 40% more lines of code than the other. Is that developer better? More impactful for the business? Should the other one be polishing their CV? Of course not. You’d want to know…
I’ve led engineering teams in some form for around 15 years now, and recently found myself not quite agreeing with what seems like a fairly common sentiment: that managing AI agents is in many ways the same as leading a team of people. This statement sets off my spidey-sense for some reason, which I hadn’t given enough thought to until now. I kinda get why people say this, because at…
AI-assisted engineering is now an expectation. It’s in performance reviews, hiring decisions, calibration conversations, and senior leadership’s productivity expectations. Which means there’s an awkward question hanging over a lot of teams right now: how do you actually measure whether someone is good at this? I lead platform engineering teams, so I’ve been working through…
The story so far I shared my AI context system in February… aaaand, it’s already out of date. Sorry! I tried keeping it in sync for a bit, but if I’m honest it was out of date by a week after that post, and I just did a git log and was amazed to see that I’ve pushed roughly 80 commits (to my private repo) since that post! So yeah, I give up. 😅 But - all is not lost! I…
In my last post I talked about Peter Naur’s “ Programming as Theory Building ” and how cognitive debt is the new thing we should be worrying about (just in case you needed another one 😅). I cut something I’ve been thinking about as that post was already getting long, so I thought I’d write another quick post just on that. My observation: Documentation isn’t…
I recently saw an ex-colleague’s post on LinkedIn referencing a blog by Margaret-Anne Storey on “cognitive debt” which I enjoyed reading, and which sent me down a bit of a rabbit-hole reading cited or related articles and posts, and thinking for far too long about my own position on the topic. I’ve added a suggested reading list at the end of this post if you’re…
Just a quickie from me based on a few chats today at work; people see AI-powered workflows and assume there’s serious technical complexity underneath. They watch a video, see a GitHub repo, and think “wtf, that’s not for me”. It can be intimidating, and I’m not suggesting my mum could easily whip up an OpenClaw instance to help her in the kitchen, but having gradually…
I’ve been writing about my AI “memory system” for a while now. The first post covers the why, and it links through to the rest of the series if you want the full picture. Since those original posts, both companion tools, “ obs-transcriber ” (which handles meeting transcriptions) and “ slacksnap ” (my Slack export browser plugin), have had some decent…
I’ve never claimed to be a good writer, but I’ve always enjoyed writing, so it actually pissed me off recently when I noticed how my last few blog posts were turning into AI slop. It sounds weird even to me now to say that I “noticed” it - as if it was super difficult to see or something. It’s not once you know what to look for. The last half a dozen posts on this…
About 18 months ago I started refining and customising how I worked with AI (Claude in my case), as I’ve written about before. While I was writing that series of posts, I was also working on what I thought was going to be an amazing, super-fancy enhancement to my very basic filesystem/markdown file based system. The new hotness The fancy new system was going to replace mere markdown files…
I’ve written about my AI memory system before, which gives Claude a “deeper” memory across conversations. I rely on this every day, but noticed that it still misses some context due to the fact that so many day-to-day conversations happen in Slack. Stuff like design discussions, technical opinions, those crucial “oh by the way” messages that reshape entire roadmaps, etc. But Slack is…
The third-party transcription app I was using for my AI memory system got flagged as non-compliant at work. Zoom’s built-in transcription only works when you’re the host. For vendor calls, external meetings, and anything where I wasn’t running the show, I needed an alternative that was free, local, and (more) compliant. So I built one. The Starting Point: Manual but Functional I…
Right… enough context, let’s cut the shit and get to the good stuff. Here’s my complete AI memory system - the one I use every day to manage engineering teams. In the previous posts ( 1 , 2 ), I showed you the background and high-level setup. Now let’s look at what I’ve built on top of that foundation. The Architecture (It’s Still Simple) Quick recap: Claude…
Last time I talked about giving your AI assistant an actual memory. Today I’ll show you how to set it up, and here’s the best bit: you barely have to write anything yourself. I didn’t want a new note-taking tool, I wanted someone else to take notes for me. The whole system runs on markdown files and folders. That’s it. But the magic is that Claude (or ChatGPT, etc) does the…
If you’re a developer, you’re drowning in AI productivity content. Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot; there’s a new YouTube tutorial every hour promising to 10x your coding output. But if you’re a people leader or knowledge worker? You get… prompt templates. Maybe a ChatGPT course on “effective communication”. Endless LinkedIn drivel (from someone trying to…