Mechanical Survival

“Wood, chainsaw, tree” by pb826 on Pixabay I first picked up a chainsaw two summers ago.

“Woman photocopying her face” licensed via iStock I want to propose the term design by cliché for the software architecture anti-pattern of trying to arrange things based on what they are called, not what they do.

I gave this talk at Agile Cambridge on 2 October 2025 Thank you very much for having me.

AI code generation is causing us to climb the ladder of abstraction beyond code, and if current trends continue, code itself is on its way to being little more than a disposable artefact—the output of the function “prompts × model”.

The Prime Minister recently announced Extract, a project by colleagues at i.AI.

Platformland: An anatomy of next-generation public services by Richard Pope. 282pp, London Publishing Partnership, September 2024 Richard Pope’s Platformland is a vision of the state as a set of interlocking, cooperating software systems, a refinement and…

A woman watches potatoes move down a conveyor belt (US National Archives, recoloured by deepai.org) Last week I and my colleagues at the Incubator for AI put on a one-day conference about retrieval-augmented generation.

This is the text of a talk I gave at the GOV.UK developer day on 6 December 2023.

Andromeda, Juan Antonio Escalante, C17th.

by Duncan Brown and Sarah Fisher Congratulations!

Perhaps you recognise this feeling: “If I could only go a little bit deeper into Google Analytics, I would finally get it.”

Sarah Fisher and I collaborated on this Medium post.

In public service, we want “digital transformation”.

At work, we very much want to understand whether people tend to apply to train to teach subjects for which their degrees are relevant.

As managers we prize autonomous teams because there is no limit to the quality of work they can deliver, and they are teams we ourselves would like to be in.

I needed to create some files in the shell and I used a brace expansion to do it: mkdir -p static/{css,js,images} This code creates this folder structure. static ├── css ├── images └── js This is quite cool!

It occurred to me while interviewing that I was more interested in the questions the candidate was asking than the answers they gave.

I’ve been working on a ClojureScript simulation of Set.