A solitary figure on a rock by a mountain lake at dawn, looking toward distant peaks.
Richard Sutcliffe

Against
the
obvious.

Technology and governance, viewed sideways.

CTO at ThinkTribal · 25 years in regulated sectors

Read the writing

38 essays · ~183 min of thinking in public

Selected writing

  1. Build log

    Seventy-Eight Clear Nights

    One amateur astronomer's log from North Yorkshire records 78 clear nights in 2023. When the sky is rationed like that, a missed night hurts, so I built an app to stop me missing them. It cannot forecast the part that mattered most.

    4 min
  2. Field note

    I Preferred Codex, but I Trust Claude Code

    I came to prefer Codex to Claude Code, paid OpenAI twice, and went back anyway. What is an allowance worth if it runs out before the work does?

    4 min
  3. Field note

    Wrong in Public Since 1997

    The footer of this site claims I have been wrong in public since 1997. A claim like that needs receipts. Here are five, dated, each traceable to an essay where the mistake is on the record.

    4 min
Older essaysBy topic

About

Twenty-five years across architecture, data governance, user research, delivery, and regulated sectors. Chief Technology Officer at ThinkTribal, building production AI tools for social housing and healthcare in weeks rather than months, working with AI as a development partner.

This site is where I think in public about what these tools reveal when you put them on real problems for real people. And about what a broad, cross-domain career turns out to be worth in the age of AI, and what it doesn’t.

The name of this site is a twenty-nine-year-old story about power. Worth two minutes.

The same discipline works on a smaller stage. Nightwatch is a free app I built for my telescope, and it says what it will not do before it says what it can.

25 yearsarchitecture to delivery, regulated sectors
2 production AI productssocial housing and healthcare
Credentials →the record, for committees who check