What this blog is
This is a learning-in-public blog about figuring out AI-assisted development. I started it in August 2025 in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work — not to showcase expertise, but to document the messy, honest process of learning something new.
The through-lines are:
- Horizon’s Edge — a tactical wargame I’m building in Godot, which started as a board game and became my main laboratory for learning to work with AI. Procedural island generation, card-driven combat, and more scope creep than any human should tolerate.
- Agentic katas — structured coding exercises I designed for practising AI-assisted development, born out of the same instinct that taught me TDD through code retreats years ago.
- The craft of AI-assisted engineering — what actually changes when you work alongside an AI agent every day. Not the hype, not the fear. The practical reality of specs, verification, context management, and knowing when to slow down.
If you’re looking for polished tutorials, this isn’t it. If you want to see what happens when curiosity meets AI-assisted development meets a nostalgic itch for a 90s RTS game — you’re in the right place.
Who I am
I’m Peter, a South African engineer living in London. By day I’m a Staff Engineer at The Economist, where I work on backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer experience. I’ve been writing software professionally for 14+ years, and the through-line of my career has been TDD, clean code, and helping other engineers grow.
The day job informs the blog. The questions I wrestle with here — how to verify AI output, how to write specs that give agents useful guardrails, how to stay sharp when the tools keep shifting — are the same questions I’m navigating at work. The difference is that here I get to be honest about the failures.
Outside of code, I’m a lifelong Doctor Who fan, avid board gamer, and book devourer. I’m currently trying to teach myself urban sketching (with questionable success), and I still get emotional over great video game storytelling. I live in London with my wife and daughter, where we’re figuring out the whole parenting thing one messy, wonderful day at a time.
Let’s build something great, and maybe a little weird, together.