AI in software engineering, grounded in real systems

Converted Victorian warehouses along a London river, with old dockside cranes, blue ironwork balconies, wooden pilings in the water, and a modern glass building beside them under a grey sky.

I lead engineering teams and write about what agentic AI changes in software work, using economic history, code, and a coffee-roasting agent that has to stay safe around real hardware.

Latest

The Factory Was the Real Invention · 19 Jul 2026
The factory, not the machine, was the real invention. The final post in the series: how the organisation decides what AI productivity is worth, and who it is for.

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The series

AI and the Industrial Revolution: a three-part series
What the first great reorganisation of work can tell us about this one, argued from economic history and evidence, not prediction.

Cheap Tokens, Cheap Attempts · 7 Jun 2026
Cheap generation doesn't make engineering judgment obsolete. It makes it the scarce thing, and the first Industrial Revolution shows why.

Better Ground, Not a Better Model · 1 Jul 2026
You don't get a better agent by buying a better model alone. You get one by preparing the ground it runs on: the tests, the structure, the rules it runs inside.

The Factory Was the Real Invention · 19 Jul 2026
The factory, not the machine, was the real invention. The final post in the series: how the organisation decides what AI productivity is worth, and who it is for.

Read the series in order, or browse everything in the writing archive.

The work

The writing stays honest because it has to survive contact with a real system: an open-source coffee-roasting agent with an audio dataset, a first-crack detection model, edge deployment on a Raspberry Pi, an MCP server that owns the roaster, and a deterministic safety harness around all of it.

See the work, or the short version of who I am and why I write this.