AI That Manages Its Own Sprint Board
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 →My AI Journey
Blog
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.
When Your AI Builds the Tool That Controls the AI
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 →I Built an MCP Server for My SaaS Product - Here's What Nearly Broke Me
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 Blog Can't Keep Up (And Neither Can I)
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 →I'm Training as a Forest School Leader
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 →What I'd Tell a .NET Developer Starting with AI Today
Retrospective advice from six months of AI-first development - the compressed version of everything I learned, for developers starting the same journey.
Read more →Teaching AI to Do My Job (Automated Bug Triage)
Designing autonomous AI agents that pick up bugs, investigate codebases, and report findings - and discovering what works and what really doesn't.
Read more →Our AI Development Methodology - From Two Guys Who Figured It Out
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 →From Visual Studio to AI-First Development
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 →Parents Are Pulling Kids Out of Coding Because of AI. Here's Why They're Wrong.
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 →Scratch Used Kids' Code to Train AI. We Use Scratch to Teach Kids.
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 →Building Three SaaS Products with AI as Co-Founder
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 →AI-Powered UX Audits: When I Let Fictional Users Review My App
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 →The AI Image Problem (and Other Things That Still Don't Work)
A counterpoint to the hype - honest about the gaps, limitations, and frustrations of working with AI every day.
Read more →Coding Is Dead, Long Live Coding
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 →What on Earth Is MCP (And Why Should You Care)?
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 →From Pricing Strategy to Stripe Integration in One Sitting
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 →How AI Blew Our Budget (And What We Did About It)
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 →When AI Can't Do CSS: The Comedy of Iterative UI Debugging
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 →It Looks Like a Developer Built a SaaS
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 →Using AI as a Senior Developer You Can't Quite Trust
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 →Using AI to Build Your Own Sales Intelligence Pipeline
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 →I Asked an AI If It Could Read My Screen
The awkward beginning - arriving at AI as a sceptic, asking daft questions, and slowly realising this thing might actually be useful.
Read more →We Launched The Code Zone Online
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 →IPSE Freelancer Awards 2015: The Aftermath
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 →5 Reasons To Give Task Board A Go
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 →I Built My Own Project Management Tool
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 →How To Manage A Team From Your Garden Shed
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 →What It's Actually Like Working at The Code Guy
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 →IPSE Freelancer Awards 2015: The Ceremony
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 →IPSE Freelancer Awards 2015: The Judging Process
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 →Want to talk?
If you're on a similar AI journey or want to discuss what I've learned, get in touch.
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