My AI Journey

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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.

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AI & Code 3 July 2026 8 min read

Make It a Compile Error: Teaching the Compiler to Police the AI

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.

Developer Tools 26 June 2026 8 min read

I Thought I Was Paying £1,200 for App Insights. I Wasn't Paying for It at All.

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.

Developer Tools 19 June 2026 9 min read

I Told the AI I Was Going to Bed. It Migrated 40 Sites While I Slept.

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.

AI & Code 12 June 2026 8 min read

The App Said I Was Offline. It Was Lying.

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.

Developer Tools 5 June 2026 8 min read

I Shipped an iPhone App Without Owning a Mac (It Took Six Tries)

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.

Developer Tools 5 May 2026 7 min read

AI SEO: Making Your Website Discoverable by LLMs

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.

Developer Tools 17 April 2026 8 min read

Teaching AI Your Project's Rules

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.

Developer Tools 17 March 2026 7 min read

From Tabnine to Agent Teams in Three Years

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.

Developer Tools 28 January 2026 9 min read

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.

AI & Code 24 November 2025 8 min read

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?

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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