It’s been a while! This blog has gone without human input for almost 12 years and aside from my previous post (written with a helping hand from Claude) this is my first of a new era.

So, why bring it back from the dead?

October 2025 marked 5 years since I’d written a line of code, 5 years since my last commit, 5 years since that dopamine hit of dreaming something up and bringing it to life with my own hands.

This is all my own doing of course. Back in 2020, after 5 years with iHasco as Creative & Technical Director, I took the opportunity to step into a full time MD role with the business, just as we were acquired by an investor backed group of UK companies.

In the years since, I’ve probably remained more involved than most MDs in product, but as we continue to grow and bring more great people into our business, I’m involved less and less in steering the direction of the things we make and more and more in defining the vision that those things align to.

That’s ok, I enjoy what I do - every day is a new challenge, a new opportunity to grow and develop but I’ve found myself pining for the hit I used to get from making things for myself again. The problem is… finding time to get back into building things, particularly knowing how out of the loop I am with modern techniques, has felt impossible.

Making things has changed. Back when I started in the web, one person could do everything - and I did. I built a career and business on the web, evolving my skills as I went, adapting to new ways of working, new languages, frameworks, approaches and tools. And aside from designing and building websites, what I enjoyed most of all was building applications (products!).

What’s become very evident in recent years is that as the web has grown into a genuinely viable foundation for proper software development, the complexity of doing this has grown too. To me, it felt like it was no longer a domain one person could truly operate.

Last year I attended an AI session put on by one of our investors and this prompted me to start exploring beyond my previous casual “chat” interactions with ChatGPT. During this session I was introduced to Replit, which our Product team were using for rapid prototyping.

I was immediately won over.

Here was a tool (an IDE of sorts) that I could interact with through a conversational layer, describing what I wanted to achieve and then seeing it come to life, nudging it in the right direction, feeding it with detail where it mattered… it’s genuinely transformative and in my opinion anyone that tells you otherwise is kidding themselves.

Software design and development has changed forever (again) and there’s no going back.

What’s evident to me is that the disruption isn’t even done yet, almost every week these tools are developing and improving, makers are out there writing skills for the AI agents, sharing their experiences and feeding this all back into the engine.

I’m curious to see what this means for the tools we’ve called on for the last decade and excited to continue exploring how AI can accelerate how we bring ideas to life and magnify their impact.