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.
Want a primer of what I have learnt about agentic engineering? Agentic Engineering →
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How twelve miniatures turned into an entire wargame in a box.
Earlier this year I came across Greathelm. It’s a micro skirmish game by Malev Da Shinobi. Six models a side, played on a sheet of A4. The quick start rules fit on a single double-sided sheet. It’s fast, it’s brutal, and it’s simple enough that you can just pick it up and muck around with it.
The Road to Hell Is Paved With Green Checks…
I started a new job recently, and the new place is fast. Night and day faster than anywhere I’ve ever worked. Everything is agentic, there’s a review pipeline that runs a stack of checks on every PR, and the amount of change moving through in a day is more than one person is built to hold in their head. Each engineer is shipping dozens of PRs a week. There’s a new bottleneck now.
Don’t Panic…
Thirty minutes into a technical interview with the CTO of a company I’d been genuinely excited about, I watched the thing collapse in real time and there was nothing I could do about it.
When feedback arrives late, noisy, or wearing the wrong sign.
Early in my career I watched a trading engine buy the same thing, over and over, on the open market, for forty-five minutes, with nobody able to stop it.