Andi Smith - Blog

There's no doubt that AI is making us all faster at our jobs.

Last week I built and shipped a browser game from a deckchair in Ibiza using nothing but my phone and AI.

If everyone on your team already uses AI every day, what does your AI adoption metric actually tell you?

If everyone on your team already uses AI every day, what does your AI adoption metric actually tell you?

We put an AI bot between our alerting and our on-call engineer.

My notes from an excellent CTO Craft Con 2026.

With the acceleration of AI, the traditional boundaries between product, engineering and UX are collapsing.

If AI is so good at solving problems, why do you still need employees?

A way to come to decisions fast, when time is not on your side.

The people you're closest to at work aren't always the people you need to be closest to.

Opus 4.5 is out and it feels like it's a big step forward in AI innovation.

For a startup, choosing the wrong app technology can cost you millions in burn and years of wasted engineering time.

In a startup it's important to reduce friction.

I recently needed to keep an eye on a third party's rate limit during a product launch, and Slack Workflows seemed like a nice solution to alert me to issues.

Your monolith is buckling under heavy traffic growth.

The business is growing, and your engineering team is too.

Your founder comes to you with the classic Minimum Viable Product (MVP) dilemma.

Some things I learnt during my time working as tech employee #1 at a startup.

I've been playing around with Inkscape for the first time this weekend.

Congratulations!

It's very easy to fall in to the trap of tool sprawl and escalating costs - particularly in the high speed world of startups.

If you examine different CTO job roles currently on job boards, you'll find that there's no established job spec for a CTO.

So you've dipped your toes in to vibe coding and you've coded a basic app, but it's lacking some flair.

When you're creating a new product at a startup, every engineering hour counts.

We live in exciting times.

How Improv taught me to be a better leader.

The pandemic in 2020 changed the world of software development forever, with teams forced to work remotely.

Sometimes when you are rehearsing or practicing Improv, getting a varied starting word can be the hardest thing.

What is vibe coding?

Recently I have been experimenting with how AI can help improve content workflows and SEO through the use of real-time content generation in a automated content workflow system.

AI is rapidly changing the way how we code.

One of the earliest games we released at Natomic Studios was a 360 Pong variant called "Containment".

Recently I came across a powerful routing feature in Next.js that completely changed how I thought about structured complex web applications.

Why moving faster often means slowing down first If you've ever had to deal with stakeholder management as an engineering leader, there's undoubtedly one question that keeps resurfacing again and again: "How do we make the developers go faster?"

Filling in InfoSec surveys is rarely fun at the best of times.

Should you be running 1:1s with your team?

With advancements in AI moving so fast, is it worth the return on investment?

How to make AI even smarter.

A technical strategy is an important part of any technical leader's arsenal.

Starting the day right with a daily note.

In case of emergency, read note.

How to get started with building a WhatsApp AI Assistant.

How to get your team up to speed.

How do you align your leadership team when it feels like everyone is working in a silo?

After almost 11 years, I am moving on from AKQA to pastures new.

Getting the right tools for the job.

In the previous post, I showed how to get started with Assemble.

The site you are visiting right now was created with Assemble, a static site generator for the Grunt task runner.

Front end development has evolved over the last couple of years thanks to npm popularised by task runners such as Grunt and Gulp.

2013 has come and gone, and it was an eventful year for me both professionally and personally.