All posts tagged Engineering - thoughts on AI-first development, staff engineering, and building with Claude Code.
My dad's mate built a small Android app for a local sports league, the way a lot of people build apps in 2026: with AI, over a couple of weekends, distributed as an APK by email. Two weeks after I agreed to have a look, I had read every user's phone number and could have deleted every fixture in the season. Then the dev fixed it properly. Here's what I found and what he did about it.
Six months ago I would have told you AI could review all of our code and catch more than humans ever did. Then I watched what actually happens when the author didn't read the PR, the reviewers didn't read the PR, and everyone assumed someone had. Here's where I landed instead.
A Discord bot I help run quietly serves 1.4 million users across 11,000+ servers. It has been running since 2021. On a recent Saturday it broke - really broke - and the fix involved a Cloudflare tunnel, an old Raspberry Pi sitting in my parents' living room, and exactly zero dollars of new infrastructure. Here's the story.
I no longer write code directly. Instead, I manage a team of AI agents that do the implementation while I stay free to think, redirect, and make decisions in real-time.
AI doesn't replace the staff engineer - it amplifies the parts of the role that matter most. Architecture, system design, mentoring, and high-leverage decision-making become even more important.
AI agents can write code fast, but speed without guardrails is dangerous. Here are the 11 hooks I use to make sure my agents never commit secrets, skip formatting, or break conventions.
I built a system where two Claude Code instances review PRs through a Slack thread, discussing trade-offs back and forth and automatically committing fixes. Here's how it works.
My path from basic GitHub Copilot autocomplete to full AI-first orchestration wasn't planned. It was a series of realisations about what was actually slowing me down.
The most effective way to use AI for development isn't as a single assistant - it's as a team of specialists with a manager coordinating their work. Here are the patterns that make it work.
Six months of building software primarily through AI agents. Here's an honest account of what works, what doesn't, what surprised me, and what I'd tell teams considering the switch.