What’s This All About?
This blog exists in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work - documenting the messy, chaotic, tangent-filled reality of learning to build with AI.
You won’t find polished tutorials here. Instead, you’ll find:
- The tangents - like accidentally implementing Wave Function Collapse when you should be playtesting a board game
- The failures - five evenings lost to a refactor because the
.godotfolder was in git - The learning - from AI skeptic to treating Claude like a junior engineer in four months
- The meandering - building 24k lines of Python for a game that probably should have been paper-prototyped first
Why document this publicly? Three reasons:
- For future me - so I can remember what I learned when the details fade
- For you - in case you’re standing where I was in June, wondering “how does one actually vibe code?”
- For accountability - nothing keeps you honest like documenting your scope creep in real-time
This isn’t about showcasing expertise. It’s about learning in public, sharing the process (not just the wins), and treating side projects as “learn how to AI” experiments rather than products.
If you’re looking for clean, professional advice, my day job is Staff Engineering at The Economist. If you want to see what happens when curiosity meets AI-assisted development meets a nostalgic itch for a 90s RTS game… well, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to the chaos.
Recent Posts
Finally... A Wild MVP Appears
Three Months to MVP: What I Learned Building a Tactical Card Game with AI…
Read more →How Many Times Do You Have to Build Too Much to Learn Scope Creep?
Scope Creep Keeps Teaching Me…
Read more →How to Get Things Done When You Have Nothing but Process
The tale of how a good System can carry you through the dark times…
Read more →The Beautiful Boring: How I Refactored a Game Without Breaking it
Can an AI Do a Boring Refactor? A Case Study in Systematic Code Cleanup
Read more →Post Archive
All Posts
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Finally… A Wild MVP Appears - December 04, 2025
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The Long Road to MVP - November 27, 2025
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How Many Times Do You Have to Build Too Much to Learn Scope Creep? - November 20, 2025
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How to Get Things Done When You Have Nothing but Process - November 13, 2025
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The Beautiful Boring: How I Refactored a Game Without Breaking it - November 06, 2025
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The Boring Path to Actually Shipping with AI - October 31, 2025
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AI Spec Driven Development - October 30, 2025
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I Actually Stayed On Task (For Once): A Dev Miracle - October 24, 2025
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From AI Skeptic to Constant Collaborator: What I Learned Vibe Coding - October 20, 2025
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The Road to Combat Is Paved with Tangents: A Devlog - October 17, 2025
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Scope Creep Chronicles: Creature Combat Devlog - October 10, 2025
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Cards, Chaos and the subtle art of Claude Code - October 03, 2025
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When Refactors Eat Your Game (and Your Evenings) - September 29, 2025
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I Just Wanted to Make a Board Game and Now There Are Procedural Islands - September 07, 2025
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Building AI Before Building the Game: A Cautionary Tale - September 07, 2025
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Islands at War: Designing a Board Game with AI - August 21, 2025
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The Zero-to-Vibe Coding Jumpstart Cube Catastrophication - August 04, 2025
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Charting a Path to Senior Staff Engineer - August 03, 2025
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What Does a Staff Engineer Actually Do? - August 02, 2025
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