A staff engineer figuring out AI-assisted development in public — the tangents, the failures, and the learning.
This blog exists in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work. You won’t find polished tutorials here. Instead: scope creep documented in real-time, refactors that went sideways, a game that probably should have been paper-prototyped first, and the slow realisation that AI changes how you work but not how hard it is.
Start here
- The origin story — A Blog of Dubious Intent — why this exists and what you’ll find
- The game — Finally… A Wild MVP Appears — three months of building a tactical wargame with AI
- The katas — How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Agentic Katas — structured practice for AI-assisted development
- The craft — The Smell of Panic When You Context Thrash — what goes wrong when you skip understanding
Latest
I'm Sorry, Dave
The more an AI can break, the less you let it do. Notes from a production incident.
About nine months ago I joined a team that owned an OpenSearch cache nobody on the team understood.
Recently
Doesn't Look Like Anything to Me
What happens when you point five 3D generation models at the same concept image.
I have been generating 3D models of World War II miniatures for printing. Concept image in, printable model out, slice it, print it on an A1 mini. The 3D model generation has been mostly Meshy, because Meshy has been mostly good enough, and good enough is a powerful drug.
I Didn't Grok Superpowers
You Can’t Just Install Someone Else’s Workflow and Level Up.
The skills moment is happening. Matt Pocock’s repo is blowing up. Superpowers, nwave.ai. Curated bundles of markdown being treated as installable expertise.
The Best Part Has No AI in It
On building the plumbing between the prompts.
A friend of mine just got a 3D printer. He read my last post, the one about building a Soviet army in three evenings, and quite reasonably wanted to know how to do it himself. We were on our phones. He could not really sit and read the prompt in full, could not digest the style-versus-pose distinction, could not work through the order of operations. He got the idea but not the practice, and so he was rediscovering most of it from scratch.