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.
When the AI writes most of the code, the bottleneck stops being writing and becomes reviewing. I've become reviewer-in-chief, and I've learned the hard way how easy it is to rubber-stamp a confident-looking diff.
Read more →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 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 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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 counterpoint to the hype - honest about the gaps, limitations, and frustrations of working with AI every day.
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 →The awkward beginning - arriving at AI as a sceptic, asking daft questions, and slowly realising this thing might actually be useful.
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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