https://www.nathanatherton.com Thoughts on software engineering, AI, and building things. en-gb Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/i-got-into-a-vibe-coded-app https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/i-got-into-a-vibe-coded-app Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton Engineering AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/nobody-read-the-code https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/nobody-read-the-code Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton Engineering AI-First Development Claude Code https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/a-time-capsule-for-my-dad https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/a-time-capsule-for-my-dad Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT At my dad's retirement party, in the gap before England vs Norway kicked off on the garden projector, I built him a digital time capsule. Guests scanned a QR code on the big screen and left sealed notes and predictions that nobody - including me - can read until 27 March 2027. The best part was watching the counter tick up all afternoon. Nathan Atherton Family Raspberry Pi Homelab AI-First Development Side Projects Claude Code https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/claude-code-in-my-pocket https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/claude-code-in-my-pocket Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT At the end of my Split writeup I said the next iteration of this lifestyle wasn't a nicer office on the road - it was no office. cc-remote is the first real step: a Claude-branded Android chat client driving persistent Claude Code sessions in tmux on a Raspberry Pi 5, over Tailscale. Full-fat Claude Code, on my phone, no laptop required. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Claude Code Raspberry Pi Homelab Remote Work https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-split https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-split Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT 30 days working remotely from Kastela, on the Dalmatian coast just outside Split. A private villa with a roof terrace, calm water minutes away, and a workflow that mostly held up - but also started giving me ideas about how to untether even further from the desk. Nathan Atherton Remote Work Travel AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/1-4-million-users-and-a-raspberry-pi-at-my-parents-house https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/1-4-million-users-and-a-raspberry-pi-at-my-parents-house Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton Side Projects Engineering Raspberry Pi Homelab https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/asking-claude-whats-on-my-driveway https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/asking-claude-whats-on-my-driveway Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT I asked Claude a question this evening - 'any cars on the drive?' - and thirty seconds later it described the cars, where they were parked, and that they hadn't moved in the last ten minutes. The thing that answered wasn't a smart-home plugin or a cloud service. It was an MCP server I'd written hours earlier, bridging my home CCTV to Claude Code. Here's what I learned building it in one evening. Nathan Atherton Side Projects Claude Code Homelab AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/my-ai-agent-became-my-life-coach https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/my-ai-agent-became-my-life-coach Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT I spent eleven days building an ambient AI agent on a Raspberry Pi. It fused my calendar, watch, location, and phone state into one decision loop, then nudged me throughout the day. I drank more water. I moved more. I was more present. Then I killed it. Here's what worked, what failed, and what every habit app has been missing. Nathan Atherton Side Projects Claude Code Raspberry Pi AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-rome https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-rome Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT A month of remote work from Rome - where world-class history is a 20-minute walk from your desk, but the local cafes want you in and out. Here's how the AI-first workflow held up against API rate limits and Italian work culture. Nathan Atherton Remote Work Travel AI-First Development Claude Code https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-a-private-gps-tracker https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-a-private-gps-tracker Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT I wanted to track my travels across Europe without handing my location data to Google. So I built a self-hosted GPS system that pings every 5 minutes, stores everything on my Raspberry Pi, and displays it on a private map only my devices can see. Nathan Atherton Side Projects Travel Raspberry Pi https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-lisbon https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/coding-from-lisbon Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT 28 days working remotely from Lisbon - how the AI-first manager pattern, a travel router, and a good routine made it one of my most productive months yet. Nathan Atherton Travel AI-First Development Remote Work https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-wigan-weather https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-wigan-weather Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT A friend built a weather app for a town in Germany. I thought - why not Wigan? Here's how I built a full-stack weather intelligence app on nothing but free-tier services. Nathan Atherton Side Projects https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/why-ai-first-development-is-perfect-for-digital-nomads https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/why-ai-first-development-is-perfect-for-digital-nomads Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT The manager/agent pattern is inherently async - spawn work, go live your life, come back to results. AI-first development and the nomad lifestyle are a natural fit. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Remote Work Travel https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-remote-engineers-toolkit-for-2026 https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-remote-engineers-toolkit-for-2026 Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT A practical, opinionated guide to the tools, hardware, and workflows that actually matter for remote engineering in 2026. Less than you think, better than you'd expect. Nathan Atherton Productivity Remote Work https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/why-i-stopped-writing-code-and-started-orchestrating-ai-agents https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/why-i-stopped-writing-code-and-started-orchestrating-ai-agents Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Engineering https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-struggle-chef https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-struggle-chef Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT I wanted to see how well AI could detect things from images. A fridge seemed like the perfect test case. The result is an app that identifies your food and suggests recipes - and roasts you if you ask it to. Nathan Atherton Side Projects AI https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-claude-code-power-setup-that-changed-how-i-build-software https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-claude-code-power-setup-that-changed-how-i-build-software Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT I published my complete Claude Code configuration as a gist - Team Lead Mode, 8 slash commands, model routing, hooks, and more. Here's what's in it and why it matters. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Productivity https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-monitoring-the-situation https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-monitoring-the-situation Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT I'm planning a nomad trip across Europe in 2026. With geopolitical tensions escalating, I built a real-time travel risk dashboard powered by a two-agent AI validation pipeline. Nathan Atherton Side Projects AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/staff-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai-what-actually-changes https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/staff-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai-what-actually-changes Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton Engineering AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/11-git-hooks-that-make-ai-agents-safe-to-run-unsupervised https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/11-git-hooks-that-make-ai-agents-safe-to-run-unsupervised Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton Engineering AI-First Development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/how-two-ai-instances-review-each-others-code https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/how-two-ai-instances-review-each-others-code Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Engineering https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/from-copilot-to-conductor-my-ai-development-journey https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/from-copilot-to-conductor-my-ai-development-journey Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Engineering https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-observable-ai-workflows-with-custom-status-lines https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/building-observable-ai-workflows-with-custom-status-lines Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT When AI agents do your development work in the background, you need observability. Here's how I built a custom status bar that shows me everything I need at a glance. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Productivity https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/model-routing-why-i-use-different-ai-models-for-different-tasks https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/model-routing-why-i-use-different-ai-models-for-different-tasks Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Using the most powerful AI model for every task is like driving a lorry to the corner shop. Here's my model routing strategy and why it improves both speed and quality. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Productivity https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-manager-pattern-treating-your-ai-like-a-development-team https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/the-manager-pattern-treating-your-ai-like-a-development-team Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Engineering https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/practical-lessons-from-six-months-of-ai-first-development https://www.nathanatherton.com/blog/practical-lessons-from-six-months-of-ai-first-development Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT 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. Nathan Atherton AI-First Development Engineering