My AI Journey
A .NET developer and CTO's honest account of going from AI sceptic to AI-first development. The wins, the failures, and everything in between.
It passed every test in the sandbox, then died live with a "<" where the JSON should be. A story about invisible firewalls, dynamic IPs, and why the senior move is the un-heroic one.
Read more →A smarter model reviewed my side project and, instead of more code, told me my "pricing problem" wasn't real - and then named the comfortable work I was hiding in.
Read more →I spent a couple of weeks rebuilding an old prediction model with AI, and the most useful thing it did wasn't predict anything. It told me my old accuracy numbers were meaningless.
Read more →I wanted a Claude that could read genuinely sensitive documents without a single byte leaving my machine. Turns out the answer wasn't a bigger local model. It was a smaller, dumber one with exactly one job.
Read more →I asked the AI to rip out a reflection-based object-mapper across dozens of files. The thing that saved me wasn't trusting the AI to be careful - it was making the build refuse to go green until every property was accounted for.
Read more →I went hunting for a £1,200 Application Insights bill that turned out not to exist. What I found instead was a single mislabelled log setting quietly firehosing £600 a month into a workspace, and a lesson about how badly cloud bills lie to your intuition.
Read more →I left an AI agent running a destructive, multi-night Azure migration and went to sleep. Here's why that wasn't brave so much as carefully boring.
Read more →My offline-first Forest School App told me I was offline on a perfectly good wifi connection, then quietly ate my saves. Turns out "offline" was three different bugs wearing a trench coat.
Read more →I'm a Windows-and-.NET man who has never owned an Apple anything. Then I decided my forest school app needed to be on the iPhone. Here's the honest version of 'iOS CI is easy now' - which is to say, six signed builds and an Xcode mismatch nobody warns you about.
Read more →I used to have Stack Overflow open in a permanent tab. Now I can't remember the last time I visited. But is that a problem, or just progress?
Read more →Traditional SEO optimises for Google. But what about ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity? A practical guide to making your site discoverable by both search engines and AI models.
Read more →A one-year retrospective on who actually drives the creative decisions in AI-assisted development - and why the answer is more reassuring than you'd think.
Read more →How real-time conversation replaced wireframes and spec documents as the primary design tool - and why the developer-as-product-owner model works better than you'd expect.
Read more →A message automation system was broken beyond repair. Instead of months of reverse engineering, we scrapped it and rebuilt from scratch - database to UI - in a single extended session.
Read more →Every major feature hits the context limit. Every continuation loses something. Here's what nobody warns you about when you build real software with AI.
Read more →How we built a living rulebook that makes every AI session better than the last - and why treating project memory like code is the best decision we made.
Read more →Fixed a CSS bug. AI re-introduced it. Fixed it again. AI re-introduced it again. The maddening reality of stateless AI development.
Read more →When your AI assistant's training data keeps overriding your project's actual terminology - and what that teaches us about the limits of context.
Read more →Building semantic search took twenty minutes. Making it look right took eighty messages, four context resets, and a developer who eventually grabbed the CSS himself.
Read more →Anthropic's CEO says he's no longer sure whether Claude is conscious. I spend hours a day working with it. Here's what that's actually like.
Read more →Building an NHS integration from scratch with AI as compliance navigator - TLS certificates, SNOMED codes, conformance questionnaires, and the long road to live.
Read more →How Claude analysed customer reviews, parsed communication logs, and helped write an award nomination - and why I had to keep correcting its assumptions.
Read more →88% of our test cases were just page-load checks. So I orchestrated six AI agents to rewrite all 417 simultaneously - and learned some hard lessons about quality control.
Read more →I wrote a massive product spec for a Conversations feature and fed it to Claude Code. It took 4+ context resets, 9 implementation phases, and some genuinely baffling UI decisions.
Read more →I was using Cursor. I wasn't using Cursor. I was using it as a glorified terminal organiser for Claude Code sessions. So I built my own desktop app in a day and open-sourced it before dinner.
Read more →I calculated my AI footprint: sixty-six miles of driving over thirty days. About one and a half school runs. That number sent me down a rabbit hole about boycotts, data centres, and where green responsibility actually sits.
Read more →In 2023 we were excited about autocomplete. By 2026 we're running autonomous AI agent teams. A timeline of how fast AI development tools actually moved.
Read more →I built a full .NET application to automate support ticket triage. Then Claude pointed out the entire thing could be replaced by a single skill definition.
Read more →The final day of the first block of Forest School training. Wind, theory, nature connection, one last sit spot, and the strange feeling of having known a group of people for years after just two weeks.
Read more →Day five of Forest School training. My brain arrived firing on every cylinder plus a few extra ones it borrowed from somewhere. Den building, chilli cooked on the fire, and a deadwood fence brought me back down.
Read more →TestPlan had become a tangled mess. So I wiped it and rebuilt the entire app in a single session with Claude Code - across four context window continuations.
Read more →Day four of Forest School training. I presented on Fröbel while being filmed, played Hostage in the woods, made land art, and whittled tiny mushrooms during free play. The comfort zone is slowly rebuilding.
Read more →MCP is brilliant when it works. But nobody talks about the sessions spent wrestling with phantom connections, deprecated protocols, Windows-specific pain, and OAuth errors that make you question your career choices.
Read more →Day three of Forest School training. I mimed being a tap, almost dropped a tree on my group, made my first mallet, and discovered that sitting in silence is the hardest thing I've done all week.
Read more →Day two of Forest School training. Knives, fire, damper bread, a tippy tap made from string and a milk bottle, and a history lesson that nearly broke me. I am Paul Pinecone.
Read more →I gave Claude Code access to our Task Board via MCP. Now it picks up tasks, implements them, commits code, comments on the ticket, and moves it to done. I mostly just watch.
Read more →Day one of Forest School Leader training. Rope is apparently in the top five play equipment internationally, I hid behind a log like a child, and I got a stone from a river that felt like my toes.
Read more →Claude Code built our TestPlan MCP server. Then I connected Claude Code to that MCP server to test the product Claude Code was building. If that sounds circular, wait until you hear the rest.
Read more →Building an MCP server for Task Board sounded straightforward. 123 messages later, I was questioning everything. OAuth callbacks, phantom tools, and the debugging marathon nobody warns you about.
Read more →The chronological story of my AI journey is falling behind reality. Boris Cherny says coding is solved, Claude Code is 4% of GitHub commits, and I'm still writing about October. Time for an author's note.
Read more →A developer who spends his life staring at screens has signed up for Forest School Leader training. The intro call involved sharing what's in your head and your heart. I managed one out of two.
Read more →Retrospective advice from six months of AI-first development - the compressed version of everything I learned, for developers starting the same journey.
Read more →Designing autonomous AI agents that pick up bugs, investigate codebases, and report findings - and discovering what works and what really doesn't.
Read more →A real, battle-tested AI development workflow from a small company. Daily routines, anti-vibe-coding rules, Friday reviews, and knowing when NOT to use AI.
Read more →The practical migration from Visual Studio to Cursor to Claude Code - every friction point a .NET developer will hit, and how to get past them.
Read more →A Telegraph headline says AI will kill coding jobs. Parents are pulling kids from coding clubs. As someone who teaches kids to code AND uses AI to build software, here's what they're missing.
Read more →When the Scratch Foundation updated their terms to allow AI training on children's projects, the community revolted. As a platform built on Scratch, here's our perspective.
Read more →From naming and positioning to architecture and pricing - using AI to go from idea to shipped product with CoSurf, Task Board, and TestPlan.
Read more →Creating fictional user personas with different tech skill levels and having AI audit the entire application from each perspective. The results were uncomfortably useful.
Read more →A counterpoint to the hype - honest about the gaps, limitations, and frustrations of working with AI every day.
Read more →Anthropic says software engineering is 'solved'. Headlines say coding is over. I write code with AI every day. Here's what's actually happening.
Read more →From complete confusion to building our own MCP servers - a plain-English guide to the protocol that makes AI actually useful. Plus: whatever happened to the metaverse?
Read more →How AI went from business strategist to engineer in a single session - designing pricing tiers, analysing competitors, and wiring up Stripe billing for TestPlan.
Read more →Everyone says AI is cheap. Nobody talks about what happens when you actually scale it in a real business. Here's what we learned the expensive way.
Read more →Emoji reactions should be simple. Modals should appear in the centre. CSS changes should actually apply. A brutally honest account of what AI-driven UI work actually looks like.
Read more →The constant battle against generic Bootstrap aesthetics. When AI builds something functional but forgettable, and the relentless iteration needed to make it look like a real product.
Read more →AI as a coding assistant - the copy-paste-and-check era. Azure pipelines, MongoDB, Blazor debugging, and learning when to trust the answers.
Read more →How a C# console app and Claude turned months of sales call transcripts into actual business intelligence - and why I had to keep asking the same questions differently.
Read more →The awkward beginning - arriving at AI as a sceptic, asking daft questions, and slowly realising this thing might actually be useful.
Read more →We took our after-school coding clubs online, won Innovate UK funding, and built something I'm genuinely proud of. Here's the story.
Read more →What actually happened after winning Freelancer of the Year. New team members, a brand refresh, and the project management tool that started it all.
Read more →I built a project management tool because the existing ones drove me mad. Here are five reasons it might sort out your workflow too.
Read more →Every PM tool I tried was great at one thing and rubbish at everything else. So I built my own. This is the story of what eventually became Task Board.
Read more →The Code Guy HQ is a garden shed. Here's how I actually make that work - and why I ended up building my own tools to do it.
Read more →No commute, no office politics, and the occasional cat on the keyboard. Here's what working at The Code Guy looks like from the inside.
Read more →Diet Coke, Shappi Khorsandi, and the moment I realised she was reading my bio. The IPSE Freelancer of the Year story, part two.
Read more →How I ended up at a Judging Day in London with a flask of vanilla tea and an animated stick man. The IPSE Freelancer of the Year story, part one.
Read more →If you're on a similar AI journey or want to discuss what I've learned, get in touch.
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