I still can't believe this ... but I'm co-hosting TEDxWibsey, a TEDx event in Bradford on 19th September. The whole journey has been a bit of a doozy so far, from looking for the venue, to marketing, to helping interview speakers ... all along with a team I couldn't have done this all without! Wibsey is one of Bradford's oldest communities, and the event is about proving that ideas are worth spreading ™️ in places small towns just as anywhere else. Local ideas and lived experiences define the future we build together. I've been organising tech events in the UK for over 4 years. Running meetups monthly in Manchester and London taught me that the best moments happen between the talks - in the hallway track. Someone connects an idea from stage to something they're already building. Speaking and hosting are also different skills. A speaker delivers one idea well. A host makes every idea in the room lands well and and ensure that a room full of people are not amongst strangers 🫂. This will be my first time co-hosting a TEDx, after years of speaking at and organising conferences. Hope to see you there 👋 📅 Saturday, 19th September 2026 📍 Bradford Art Centre

opus 5.5 has completely spoiled me. I can't bear using anything below 6.1 sol - high now in Codex. Astra doesn't even get the new 500k context window. Pls fix @thsottiaux

Something unexpected happened in April - after my panel talk at DTX Manchester on AI Security. @uctodaynews asked me how I've brought AI into organisations that resist change in the past. Having done this once or twice now, my answer is simple: hand it to people who aren't engineers. Marketers, legal and especially sales teams can get real work out of Claude Code or OpenAI Codex. Any job which requires a lot of manual search or work that involves drudgery can be sped up using these tools. The humans are only required to collate data and make decisions. Two more points from my chat with Alex Cole: 👉 Trust your teams first. If every team has to fight for access, an agent that can change the auth code or a database turns that friction into open conflict. 👉 Find the people already excited about these tools and get them running workshops and internal communities, so the excitement spreads within the team. Opening up access only works when the systems behind it are safe for agents to use. That's my keynote this Friday at Birmingham Tech Week 🎤 Your API Is Not Agent-Ready Yet, 10:30am on Friday 23 October at Birmingham Tech Week's Engineering & Developer Conference, ICC Birmingham. I'll share what I learned building agent-ready APIs and MCPs, including why permissions have to be enforced by the server and never left to the agent. Come say hi 👋

The UK Global Talent Visa lets you work for any employer, or yourself, with no sponsor 🇬🇧 These 6 mistakes could cost you yours👇 1. Recognition beyond your employer 🏢 Promotions and internal awards show your company values you. Your application also needs proof that people outside it recognise your work. 2. Ownership plus outcome 📈 Commits show you built the feature. Show what changed after it shipped, and how your work drove that result. 3. The right criterion 🎯 An impressive achievement placed under the wrong criterion won't help you. Match each document to the claim it can actually support. 4. Distinct reference letters ✍️ A letter that repeats your CV adds little. Each referee should explain what they saw first-hand and why it mattered. 5. Community work with outcomes 🤝 Mentoring and open source count when you show what others gained from your contribution. Membership of a programme leaves that question open. 6. Readable, verifiable proof 🔍 Tiny screenshots and links to editable cloud folders make your claims hard to check. Put the essential evidence in the documents themselves. Before you add another document, find the gap it closes. Extra material only helps when it answers the question the assessor still has. Full breakdown on my website - thewriting.dev/global-talent…

Judged the @hacktoberfest Hackathon at the @OfficialUoM this weekend, hosted by the Open Source Society 🐝 These students launched an open source club just weeks ago. A brand new society, already pulling off a full hackathon with @MLHacks. Wow! Hands-free computer interfaces. AI music generators. A rap battle app that turns any object you photograph into a character with its own voice and comebacks. All open source & built in a single day! Big thanks to the Open Source Society for running it. Building an open source community at uni is one of the highest-impact things you can do. Keep going 🚀

Only @nptel_official can casually drop courses that have the ability to change people's lives. Ps, I started my career by picking up a full-stack NodeJS NPTEL course in 2017!!

This strongly feels like something that should be a part of UK law

I’m feeling super excited 🤯. I've been invited to speak at Birmingham Tech Week’s Engineering & Developer Conference on Friday 23 October!! My talk, "Your API Is Not Agent-Ready Yet", is about helping API engineers and technical leads build interfaces AI agents can use safely and reliably. I’ll share practical design ideas from my work building agent-ready APIs and MCP for an influential AI company and a Cambridge-based AI lab. There’s plenty more on the programme, including talks and workshops from key members of DevOps Society. I'm proud to be an AI ambassador there! If you work on APIs or lead a technical team, come along for the day at the ICC Birmingham. My talk starts at 10:30am 👋.

One thing I do is run multiple parallel sub-agents/threads within one conversation in Codex/Claude. Even though Codex has a better UI for sub-agents, Claude actually does a better job of running subagents in a way that gets out of your way. Frequently I want to ask Codex other things while it might be doing something else with sub-agents - watching CI, reviewing some changes, etc - and it will just not do it till the subagent returns. I don't know what Claude does but it just feels much more responsive to commands even with subagents running!

Day 2 - we at No 10 in the South today 🇬🇧

First day at the Future States: 10 Downing Street hackathon today 🇬🇧🫡

This year, I’ve helped UK Global Talent applicants understand what their evidence needs to show, through forum discussions and calls on Topmate. So far, I’ve helped people across 31 sessions just this quarter! Each session involved someone trying to work out how to turn a career full of experience into an application an assessor could follow. The work was usually in finding the evidence that mattered and making the applicant’s contribution clear. Thank you to everyone who booked a session or sent a message this year. I appreciate the trust. 🙏