I'm an engineer in Jersey. Roughly two thirds of my working week now
runs through some kind of loop with an AI agent: Claude Code,
Codex, Cursor, and a few scripts of my own to
herd them. I type less code than I used to. More of it ends up doing
something useful. The craft has migrated; it lives now in framing a
problem clearly enough that a model can be put to work on it, and in
knowing when to leave it alone.
The unit of work is no longer a line of code. It is a loop.
The interesting decisions sit a layer above where they used to.
I write fewer lines by hand.
I write more prompts, more harnesses, more checks.
The same sort of software comes out the other end. There is just more of it, and it arrives sooner.
This skill only comes from using it.
There is no shortcut, and no book that teaches it well yet.
Every loop teaches you something about the next.
It accumulates faster than you might expect.
With the right tools, a small group of careful people can now do work that used to need a department.
Speed is an advantage worth having again.
So is taste. So is paying attention.
Twenty-one years as Technical Director of a small Jersey studio.
Independent since the end of 2025.
Working with people I want to work with, on problems I think are worth solving.
I would rather make a small thing that earns its keep than a big thing that does not.
The pitch deck is not the product.
A tool someone reaches for daily is worth more than a platform they open twice.
This is the most interesting period in software I have worked through.
Problems that were hard have got cheap.
Problems that were impossible have got hard.
There is nowhere I would rather be working.
If you are a small team building something specific, and AI is part of how you intend to build it, I would like to hear from you.