Peter van Onselen: Staff Engineering & AI

Don’t Panic… Thirty minutes into a technical interview with the CTO of a company I’d been genuinely excited about, I watched the thing collapse in real time and there was nothing I could do about it.

When feedback arrives late, noisy, or wearing the wrong sign.

Burn the land and boil the sea; the skills, I hope, come with me.

Panic!

Notes from a production incident.

What happens when you point five 3D generation models at the same concept image.

You Can’t Just Install Someone Else’s Workflow and Level Up.

On building the plumbing between the prompts.

On discovering that good process survives the jump from code to plastic.

On discovering that “show your work” is not the same thing as “do the work well.”

That they forgot to ask whether SSHing into an AI coding agent from a phone was a good idea.

I Vibe Coded A Model Into My House There is a 3D printed World War II German infantryman sitting on my desk.

We don’t talk about Code coverage, no no no, we don’t talk about coverage… When I joined Cazoo, it was the first place I’d ever worked that explicitly, actively, aggressively embraced software craftsmanship.

On discovering that your favourite tool got measurably worse, that you’d been blaming yourself for it, and that the only reason you noticed at all was because another harness was sitting right next to it behaving normally.

A modest meditation on plugins, portability, and the peculiar sorrow of a workflow that cannot leave the building.

You were the chosen one!

High high hope for the code, shooting for a PR when I couldn’t even make a commit… Over the past few weeks I have been increasingly panicked.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger … right?

I don’t know how to teach this.

True stories from the front lines of the internet… Alice in Wonderland by Valerie Hinojosa / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Now this is a story all about how one button link got my codebase flipped turned upside down.