Topics

Two cuts through the writing: by series, which follows each arc, and by topic, which groups across them. The blog is the plain chronological view.

By series

AI-assisted engineering

What actually changes when you work with AI tools every day, where the interesting failures live, and the small disciplines that keep production sane.

• Money for Nothing — When feedback arrives late, noisy, or wearing the wrong sign. — June 2026

• The Machine Had Been Keeping a Diary — Burn the land and boil the sea; the skills, I hope, come with me. — June 2026

• Encode It, Don’t Remember It — Panic! at the SWC Compiler: cannot add pure comment to zero position. — June 2026

• The more an AI can break, the less you let it do. — Notes from a production incident. — June 2026

• Doesn’t Look Like Anything to Me — What happens when you point five 3D generation models at the same concept image. — May 2026

• I Didn’t Grok Superpowers — You Can’t Just Install Someone Else’s Workflow and Level Up. — May 2026

• The Best Part Has No AI in It — On building the plumbing between the prompts. — May 2026

• Show Your Work — On discovering that “show your work” is not the same thing as “do the work well.” — May 2026

• Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied — That they forgot to ask whether SSHing into an AI coding agent from a phone was a good idea. — May 2026

• Conscious Coverage — We don’t talk about Code coverage, no no no, we don’t talk about coverage… — April 2026

• The Canary in the Harness — On discovering that your favourite tool got measurably worse, that you’d been blaming yourself for it, and that the only reason you noticed at all was because another harness was sitting right next to it behaving normally. — April 2026

• The Grand Plugin Trap — A modest meditation on plugins, portability, and the peculiar sorrow of a workflow that cannot leave the building. — April 2026

• The Council Will See You Now… — You were the chosen one! You were supposed to destroy the hallucinations, not join them! — April 2026

• The Smell of Panic When You Context Thrash — High high hope for the code, shooting for a PR when I couldn’t even make a commit… — March 2026

• The Feedback That Doesn’t Care About Your Title — What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger … right? — March 2026

• How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Agentic Katas — I don’t know how to teach this. But I think I’ve figured out how to practice it… — March 2026

• 14 PRs, 6 Repos, 1 Button: A Tale of Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole — True stories from the front lines of the internet… — February 2026

• This Is the Way: Delete the Code — How I learned to do AI Katas and make disposable code helped me recover from burnout — February 2026

• Why You Shouldn’t Speedrun a Production Refactor — Learning the hard way that AI makes discipline more important, not less… — December 2025

• The Boring Path to Actually Shipping with AI — Or: How I Learned to Stop Vibing and Love the Spec” — October 2025

• AI Spec Driven Development — A brief summary of what I have learnt — October 2025

• From AI Skeptic to Constant Collaborator: What I Learned Vibe Coding — The Question That Started Everything… am I going to lose my job? — October 2025

Horizon’s Edge

The game-dev devlog: a tactical wargame in Godot that began as a board game and grew legs. In order, so the arc reads start to finish.

• Islands at War: Designing a Board Game with AI — August 2025

• I Just Wanted to Make a Board Game and Now There Are Procedural Islands — Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Chaos …. — September 2025

• Building AI Before Building the Game: A Cautionary Tale — The curious case of Sky Islands and the Endless Roads leading nowhere …. — September 2025

• When Refactors Eat Your Game (and Your Evenings) — From Buttons to Cards: A Sideways Journey — September 2025

• Cards, Chaos and the subtle art of Claude Code — Last Time on Madness Boulevard… — October 2025

• Scope Creep Chronicles: Creature Combat Devlog — Crouching Creature Combat, hidden tangents… — October 2025

• The Road to Combat Is Paved with Tangents: A Devlog — I set out to make a combat system. I returned with roads, models, and a blink ability… — October 2025

• I Actually Stayed On Task (For Once): A Dev Miracle — Breaking news: Developer completes planned features … who would have thought? — October 2025

• 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 — November 2025

• 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… — November 2025

• How Many Times Do You Have to Build Too Much to Learn Scope Creep? — Scope Creep Keeps Teaching Me… — November 2025

• The Long Road to MVP — How I learned to stop overthinking and ship the damn thing… — November 2025

• Finally… A Wild MVP Appears — Three Months to MVP: What I Learned Building a Tactical Card Game with AI… — December 2025

Side projects & meta

Where it started (a Magic: The Gathering cube), the Bolt Action 3D-print pipeline, and why this blog exists.

• An Army of One Prompt — On discovering that good process survives the jump from code to plastic. — May 2026

• I Built This In A Prompt Window! With A Box Of Filament! — I Vibe Coded A Model Into My House — April 2026

• The Zero-to-Vibe Coding Jumpstart Cube Catastrophication — From Pauper to Pandemonium: Building a Magic Jumpstart cube when you can’t change anything — August 2025

• What Does a Staff Engineer Actually Do? — Originally written as an internal working spec while I was at Cazoo, this post is my take on the responsibilities and mindset of a Staff Engineer. It helped me reflect on what the role requires, not just in terms of technical ability, but also leadership, communication, and constant adaptation. — August 2025

• A Blog of Dubious Intent — August 2025

By topic

• agentic katas (1)
• ai assisted engineering (21)
• career meta (2)
• case study (6)
• game development (13)
• print pipeline (4)
• specs and process (5)
• tools (4)