I write about careers and AI, mainly. I’m Head of AI Engineering at a UK-based scale-up. Recommended reads: Being good isn’t enough The systems-centric...
In the early nineties the US Environmental Protection Agency got into a fight with a company over a contaminated site in New Hampshire. The company had already spent a fortune cleaning the site up. They’d removed enough toxic chemicals that a child could safely play there and even eat small amounts of dirt 70 days a year. But the EPA weren’t satisfied. They wanted the chemical levels lower. So low…
One of the easiest ways to make yourself feel bad is to put other people on a pedestal. This happens all the time in tech. We look at this firm or that and assume everyone there must be extraordinary. Maybe that’s true somewhere, but I’ve never seen it. There are outliers but, by definition, they’re rare. Mostly it’s just hard-working people doing their job the best they can, making mistakes along…
A good way to do great things fast is to set a deadline you probably can’t keep. Doing this removes the bullshit and leaves behind only what matters; like sifting out the dirt and leaving the gold. Instead of asking what you could do, it forces you to ask what you must do. When you have plenty of time, it tends to fill up with coulds . We could do this, we could do that. This is especially true…
How do you decide if a job is worth taking? After years of making mistakes, I’ve settled on a simple approach: Meaning, money, and lifestyle. You want at least two. Ideally all three. How you define these is personal, but here’s what they roughly mean. Meaning is the work itself. Do you care about it? Does it matter to you? Would you be proud to get good at it? Money is whether the job pays enough…
The quality of technical judgement will increasingly determine the quality of strategic judgement. And in the next decade, many companies will be limited by the technical judgement of their leaders. Too often, the people making the biggest decisions about software, data, and AI can’t tell whether those systems are any good. They can’t judge the work itself, so they judge the things around it. The…
Not long ago, everyone wanted to be a data scientist. Now they want to be an AI engineer. It’s a fast-growing, exciting, and lucrative role. At its simplest level, an AI engineer builds software where models are a core part of the system. Usually LLMs. To do this well requires a daunting list of skills: software engineering, machine learning, data engineering, and more. But you don’t need to…
The question everyone seems to be asking lately is whether it’s still worth learning to code. You can just describe what you want in plain old English, and a machine builds it for you. So what’s the point of learning how to do it yourself? The answer depends on why you’re asking. I learned the guitar for fun; I didn’t need any more reason than that. And the same is true for coding; if you want to…
Most AI products today use the same models. So why don’t they create the same value? Behind the frontier, extracting value from AI is less about choosing a model and more about building the system around it. Memory, tools, retrieval, workflows, skills, trust, interfaces, evaluation, and how all of those parts work together. This is where products become much better or much worse, and is the…
When I was young, my neighbour made me an offer: start at 1 and double it for every square on a chessboard. If I made it to the end of the board he’d give me £10. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512... ten doubles in and I was on track. But doubling one sixty-four times doesn’t give you thousands, or millions, or even billions. It gets you over 18 quintillion . 1 I didn’t win the money, but I…
A big chunk of a career is spent just doing stuff . Sometimes because it’s interesting, mostly because someone told us to. Almost never because the value clearly outweighs the cost. We assume someone else is checking. Somewhere up the chain, someone must be making sure this work matters. But usually no one is. In small firms there’s some protection. You’re closer to the money. If you’re burning…