Archive.

37 essays · since 2026

2026

10 August 2026
The One Skill Every Coding Library Never Wrote
Twenty-five years leading projects without a psychologist on the team, and I've spent the last few months writing three skills putting user psychology into the code itself.
28 June 2026
The Enterprise Cuts Corners You'd Never Forgive in a Beginner
A popular take says vibe coding collapses on contact with the enterprise. I spent twenty-five years building national systems in regulated sectors. The rigour invoked to dismiss AI-built software is usually the first thing those systems cut.
12 June 2026
The Dependency Your Board Never Priced
I spent a week fixing my AI coding tool instead of writing code, then found the fault was the supplier's, not mine. The episode exposed a dependency most boards have left off the risk register.
5 June 2026
The Gatekeepers Are Guarding an Empty Room
I built a multi-agent pipeline to reach AI development speed without the technical debt. The hard part was the governing, not the code, and it changes who gets to build at all.
28 May 2026
The Data Is Not the Gap
Every dataset needed to link health and housing already exists and is published. It sits inert because no landlord and no ICB has ever opened a single view showing their own position against their peers. That gap is what moves money.
24 May 2026
The Governance Failure Nobody Called Treason
Brexit was not a democratic decision. It was a governance failure dressed in the language of the people's will. A decade on, the damage is not abstract. It is baked into every public service, every trade relationship, and every career that crossed a border.
22 May 2026
The Reporting Layer Is the Last Thing to Fail
Most boards discover a problem the moment their reporting turns red. By then it is old. Point-in-time assurance describes a position the organisation has already left behind.
19 May 2026
You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of a Foundational Problem
The NHS has responded to every data problem for thirty years by buying a platform. The Nordics tried something bolder and spent billions discovering the same thing: you cannot procure your way to infrastructure.
18 May 2026
The Virtual Ward Sitting in Plain Sight
The NHS spends £562 a bed day to substitute for a building it does not own. The registered provider owns the building. Neither board has noticed the other is on the same agenda.
15 May 2026
Your Board Is Flying Blind on Complaints Data
Every Housing Ombudsman determination is public. Thousands of them. Your board has no structured view of what they mean for your organisation — and that gap is now a regulatory risk.
13 May 2026
The Patient Owns the Record. The Patient Is Not the Controller.
The Secretary of State said the Single Patient Record would be owned by the patient. The governance minutes say someone else entirely is the data controller. Boards relying on the first sentence are buying risk shaped by the second.
9 May 2026
Six Builds, One Month, and the Spark I Thought I Had Lost
A resurrected domain, two near-market housing products, a Swift fix, a land-plot mapper, an agentic family-tree researcher, and a narrated-walkthrough skill written on a Thursday evening. All in roughly four weeks, by one person.
8 May 2026
We're Gonna Need a Smaller Boat
Walkthrough-video production used to be six-figure work. I built the tool to do it in an afternoon. The arithmetic of software construction has inverted, and most boards have not caught up.
7 May 2026
The Twenty-Year Liability Became the Edge
I shipped a production housing product without a product manager, a user researcher, a business analyst, a UX designer, or a tester. The work still happened. The reason it worked is not the one most boards are being told.
6 May 2026
I Built a Sector Intelligence Platform in Three Weeks. Any Board Should Be Asking Why.
The cost of building a sector-specific intelligence platform has collapsed by an order of magnitude. Most boards have not absorbed the shift.
5 May 2026
Five pages, five different slogans, and one source of truth.
Until July 2025 our website ran five different slogans on five different pages, with one of them visibly broken on screen. Brand drift is a governance problem dressed up as a marketing one, and the fix is not a brand book.
4 May 2026
AI Inherits Whatever Data You Already Had
Boards are funding models and assuming the data underneath is fine. It is not. The metadata problem the NHS has been working on for a decade is now everyone's AI problem.
29 April 2026
The Other Side Always Has Better Records
A housing association handles complaints for a living. The tenant has never made one. The asymmetry is not an accident, and the economics of fixing it have shifted.
22 April 2026
We Were Solving the Wrong Problem for 25 Years. Then We Asked the Users.
England runs over a billion pathology tests a year. Three replacement coding programmes failed before one finally landed. The difference was who got asked.
15 April 2026
Your Baseline Was Contaminated Before the Project Began
Business cases get written before user research arrives, and baseline data gets collected after the organisation knows something is coming. The benefit you claim at review is real, and smaller than forecast.
8 April 2026
The Benefits Case Was Wrong, and the User Researcher Knew It
Benefits managers and user researchers work on the same programmes. They are rarely in the same room. The seam between them is where benefit cases quietly come apart.
1 April 2026
Benefits Theatre: Why Your Business Case Is Still Waterfall
Public sector delivery is agile. The business case approving the work is a waterfall artefact sitting at the entrance. The two halves of the programme do not share a methodology, and almost nobody names it.
25 March 2026
Your Board Is Making AI Governance Decisions Whether It Knows It Or Not
Every organisation deploying AI is making governance decisions. The question is whether those decisions are made deliberately, in advance, or by default, under pressure, after something has gone wrong.
18 March 2026
The Dashboard Won't Save You: Why Social Housing's Data Problem Is a Culture Problem
Sixty-one per cent of UK housing providers say their staff lack the data literacy to make a data strategy work. The barrier is not the software.
11 March 2026
All About Power and the Legacy of a Domain Name
On beta testing, PC magazine cover discs, and what an institution with nothing to lose taught me about power.
4 March 2026
Thirty Years Ago I Built Clinical Software Between Supermarket Shifts. The Tools Have Changed. The Work Hasn't.
Cross-domain breadth was a career liability in 1995. With AI, it has become the multiplier that lets a single practitioner ship working public-sector software in a fortnight.
25 February 2026
Sonos Sacked Its CEO Over an App Update. Your AI Rollout Is the Same Decision.
In May 2024, Sonos pushed an app update which broke its own product. By January 2025, the CEO and several other executives were gone. Most boards reading the story missed the part with implications for their own AI rollout.
18 February 2026
The Billion-Pound Problem Your Board Has Never Discussed
The National Audit Office estimated poor data quality cost the NHS around £1 billion a year. The figure has been public since 2021. Most boards in regulated industries have an equivalent number, and most have never seen it land on an agenda.
11 February 2026
The Compliance Dashboard Nobody Reads
Most boards have a regulatory dashboard. Most of those products are not used. The reason is not executive data literacy. The reason is design built for the people who own the data, not the people accountable for the decisions.
4 February 2026
The Service That Worked Because It Did Not Assume Its User
The previous attempts at digital GP registration assumed a confident, English-speaking, address-holding patient. The one which scaled to nearly a million registrations did not. The difference was a governance choice made before a single line of code was written.
28 January 2026
The Theory-First Product Hire Is a Governance Risk
The orthodoxy says domain knowledge is a liability for product leaders. Boards repeating it are hiring confidently and failing reliably. The arithmetic has changed, and the safer bet is the opposite of what the textbooks recommend.
22 January 2026
When the Accountable Person Is You
The Building Safety Act made an individual at the top of every social housing provider personally liable for records they have often never seen. Most boards have not yet absorbed what the Act asks of them. The audit committee question is overdue.
15 January 2026
Two Boards, One Tenant, No Conversation
A housing association and an NHS Integrated Care System hold complementary halves of the same person's record. Both are now legally exposed by the gap between them. The conversation neither board is having is the one their successors will be asked about.
8 January 2026
The Blue Badge Renewal Form Is a Governance Failure
I renewed my mother's Blue Badge last week. The form excluded the person it was built for. The failure was not technical. It was scoped in at the board.

2026

10 August 2026

The One Skill Every Coding Library Never Wrote

Twenty-five years leading projects without a psychologist on the team, and I've spent the last few months writing three skills putting user psychology into the code itself.

28 June 2026

The Enterprise Cuts Corners You'd Never Forgive in a Beginner

A popular take says vibe coding collapses on contact with the enterprise. I spent twenty-five years building national systems in regulated sectors. The rigour invoked to dismiss AI-built software is usually the first thing those systems cut.

12 June 2026

The Dependency Your Board Never Priced

I spent a week fixing my AI coding tool instead of writing code, then found the fault was the supplier's, not mine. The episode exposed a dependency most boards have left off the risk register.

5 June 2026

The Gatekeepers Are Guarding an Empty Room

I built a multi-agent pipeline to reach AI development speed without the technical debt. The hard part was the governing, not the code, and it changes who gets to build at all.

28 May 2026

The Data Is Not the Gap

Every dataset needed to link health and housing already exists and is published. It sits inert because no landlord and no ICB has ever opened a single view showing their own position against their peers. That gap is what moves money.

24 May 2026

The Governance Failure Nobody Called Treason

Brexit was not a democratic decision. It was a governance failure dressed in the language of the people's will. A decade on, the damage is not abstract. It is baked into every public service, every trade relationship, and every career that crossed a border.

22 May 2026

The Reporting Layer Is the Last Thing to Fail

Most boards discover a problem the moment their reporting turns red. By then it is old. Point-in-time assurance describes a position the organisation has already left behind.

19 May 2026

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of a Foundational Problem

The NHS has responded to every data problem for thirty years by buying a platform. The Nordics tried something bolder and spent billions discovering the same thing: you cannot procure your way to infrastructure.

18 May 2026

The Virtual Ward Sitting in Plain Sight

The NHS spends £562 a bed day to substitute for a building it does not own. The registered provider owns the building. Neither board has noticed the other is on the same agenda.

15 May 2026

Your Board Is Flying Blind on Complaints Data

Every Housing Ombudsman determination is public. Thousands of them. Your board has no structured view of what they mean for your organisation — and that gap is now a regulatory risk.

13 May 2026

The Patient Owns the Record. The Patient Is Not the Controller.

The Secretary of State said the Single Patient Record would be owned by the patient. The governance minutes say someone else entirely is the data controller. Boards relying on the first sentence are buying risk shaped by the second.

9 May 2026

Six Builds, One Month, and the Spark I Thought I Had Lost

A resurrected domain, two near-market housing products, a Swift fix, a land-plot mapper, an agentic family-tree researcher, and a narrated-walkthrough skill written on a Thursday evening. All in roughly four weeks, by one person.

8 May 2026

We're Gonna Need a Smaller Boat

Walkthrough-video production used to be six-figure work. I built the tool to do it in an afternoon. The arithmetic of software construction has inverted, and most boards have not caught up.

7 May 2026

The Twenty-Year Liability Became the Edge

I shipped a production housing product without a product manager, a user researcher, a business analyst, a UX designer, or a tester. The work still happened. The reason it worked is not the one most boards are being told.

6 May 2026

I Built a Sector Intelligence Platform in Three Weeks. Any Board Should Be Asking Why.

The cost of building a sector-specific intelligence platform has collapsed by an order of magnitude. Most boards have not absorbed the shift.

5 May 2026

Five pages, five different slogans, and one source of truth.

Until July 2025 our website ran five different slogans on five different pages, with one of them visibly broken on screen. Brand drift is a governance problem dressed up as a marketing one, and the fix is not a brand book.

4 May 2026

AI Inherits Whatever Data You Already Had

Boards are funding models and assuming the data underneath is fine. It is not. The metadata problem the NHS has been working on for a decade is now everyone's AI problem.

29 April 2026

The Other Side Always Has Better Records

A housing association handles complaints for a living. The tenant has never made one. The asymmetry is not an accident, and the economics of fixing it have shifted.

22 April 2026

We Were Solving the Wrong Problem for 25 Years. Then We Asked the Users.

England runs over a billion pathology tests a year. Three replacement coding programmes failed before one finally landed. The difference was who got asked.

15 April 2026

Your Baseline Was Contaminated Before the Project Began

Business cases get written before user research arrives, and baseline data gets collected after the organisation knows something is coming. The benefit you claim at review is real, and smaller than forecast.

8 April 2026

The Benefits Case Was Wrong, and the User Researcher Knew It

Benefits managers and user researchers work on the same programmes. They are rarely in the same room. The seam between them is where benefit cases quietly come apart.

1 April 2026

Benefits Theatre: Why Your Business Case Is Still Waterfall

Public sector delivery is agile. The business case approving the work is a waterfall artefact sitting at the entrance. The two halves of the programme do not share a methodology, and almost nobody names it.

25 March 2026

Your Board Is Making AI Governance Decisions Whether It Knows It Or Not

Every organisation deploying AI is making governance decisions. The question is whether those decisions are made deliberately, in advance, or by default, under pressure, after something has gone wrong.

18 March 2026

The Dashboard Won't Save You: Why Social Housing's Data Problem Is a Culture Problem

Sixty-one per cent of UK housing providers say their staff lack the data literacy to make a data strategy work. The barrier is not the software.

11 March 2026

All About Power and the Legacy of a Domain Name

On beta testing, PC magazine cover discs, and what an institution with nothing to lose taught me about power.

4 March 2026

Thirty Years Ago I Built Clinical Software Between Supermarket Shifts. The Tools Have Changed. The Work Hasn't.

Cross-domain breadth was a career liability in 1995. With AI, it has become the multiplier that lets a single practitioner ship working public-sector software in a fortnight.

25 February 2026

Sonos Sacked Its CEO Over an App Update. Your AI Rollout Is the Same Decision.

In May 2024, Sonos pushed an app update which broke its own product. By January 2025, the CEO and several other executives were gone. Most boards reading the story missed the part with implications for their own AI rollout.

18 February 2026

The Billion-Pound Problem Your Board Has Never Discussed

The National Audit Office estimated poor data quality cost the NHS around £1 billion a year. The figure has been public since 2021. Most boards in regulated industries have an equivalent number, and most have never seen it land on an agenda.

11 February 2026

The Compliance Dashboard Nobody Reads

Most boards have a regulatory dashboard. Most of those products are not used. The reason is not executive data literacy. The reason is design built for the people who own the data, not the people accountable for the decisions.

4 February 2026

The Service That Worked Because It Did Not Assume Its User

The previous attempts at digital GP registration assumed a confident, English-speaking, address-holding patient. The one which scaled to nearly a million registrations did not. The difference was a governance choice made before a single line of code was written.

28 January 2026

The Theory-First Product Hire Is a Governance Risk

The orthodoxy says domain knowledge is a liability for product leaders. Boards repeating it are hiring confidently and failing reliably. The arithmetic has changed, and the safer bet is the opposite of what the textbooks recommend.

22 January 2026

When the Accountable Person Is You

The Building Safety Act made an individual at the top of every social housing provider personally liable for records they have often never seen. Most boards have not yet absorbed what the Act asks of them. The audit committee question is overdue.

15 January 2026

Two Boards, One Tenant, No Conversation

A housing association and an NHS Integrated Care System hold complementary halves of the same person's record. Both are now legally exposed by the gap between them. The conversation neither board is having is the one their successors will be asked about.

8 January 2026

The Blue Badge Renewal Form Is a Governance Failure

I renewed my mother's Blue Badge last week. The form excluded the person it was built for. The failure was not technical. It was scoped in at the board.