AI

Building a slide deck with pencil.dev and Claude Design

A head-to-head of pencil.dev vs Claude Design on the same markdown input. Claude Design produced the more polished deck and handled speaker notes; pencil.dev still wins for iterative UI work where direct manipulation matters.

Courage as a service

AI is making the knowledge side of consulting cheaper by the day. Teams still avoid the legacy system. The gap is not expertise. It is the structural courage to act on what everyone already knows.

Stop letting documentation rot

Five types of documentation, five different AI leverage stories. The question isn’t whether to involve AI in your docs; it’s where each type belongs and how much maintenance you can hand off.

Pairing with a yes-machine

Pairing with an AI feels like pair programming. It isn't. There's one prior in the room, and it's trained to agree. This post makes the case for mob programming and spec-driven development as the structural fix.

The AI skills gap

In 40+ interviews, senior engineers from major banks and consultancies showed strong backgrounds but little real AI fluency. No RAG, no agent frameworks. The gap isn't about skill, it's about exposure.

Hermes: the agent that doesn't quit when you close your laptop

Hermes is an open-source AI agent that runs on a server, remembers across sessions, and builds reusable skills over time. The shift it represents: AI moving from something you summon to something that runs.

Building a customer support AI agent that learns before it speaks

A customer support AI agent built in stages: shadow mode first, internal notes second, auto-send only after the data earns it. A walkthrough of the architecture, the knowledge base design, and the lessons that held up.

LLMs everywhere, even in cars

LLMs are no longer a tab you open. They're the interface layer between intent and every system underneath. This post maps what ambient AI, edge inference, and agent-as-infrastructure mean for how you design modern software.

The end of the all-you-can-eat buffet

The all-you-can-eat era of AI is ending. Compute constraints, heavier models, and a fully hooked user base are pushing providers toward pay-as-you-go. That shift will force better choices, smaller models, and fiercer competition between tools.

ElevenLabs: voice cloning, agents, and what they mean for your product

Voice is where AI product differentiation is heading. This post walks through ElevenLabs voice cloning and conversational agents in enough detail to evaluate whether the technology is ready for your use case.

"Good news, I built it in Lovable.": an engineer's guide to surviving that sentence

Business users love Lovable. Engineers tend to panic. A real-world case study of how to wrap an AI builder in guardrails so non-technical teams can move fast without quietly rewriting the systems that give your product its edge.

Python as the new Latin

I used to teach people to code. And looking back, I was teaching students to write it by hand while the tools that write it for them were getting better every single month. So what should a coding classroom actually look like now?

Customer support in the AI era

Most AI-powered customer support is optimised for deflection, not resolution. The problem isn’t bad agents, it’s architecture: no shared context, no real permissions, no escalation path that works.

Mental capacity is a bottleneck

AI removes bottlenecks until it reaches the one that doesn’t move: human cognition. The faster AI makes your system, the more your team’s mental capacity becomes the constraint. You can’t add more of it.

Taste is the moat

When AI closes the execution gap, taste becomes the differentiator. Curation, judgement, and the willingness to say “not this” compound over time in ways that models can’t replicate.

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