A few months ago I sat down to work through some thoughts about the different ways developers are working with AI. The list seemed straightforward enough at the time. There was the spicy autocomplete you got in your IDE. There was the turn-by-turn chat with Claude or ChatGPT. There was the Git-integrated agent — Codex, […]
Beat Burnout, Find Flourishing: The AI Edition The pace feels relentless. A new AI tool arrives on your team's desk every few weeks. Code completion assistants, autonomous agents, generative models for everything from design to documentation. There's genuine excitement about what's possible, but underneath it runs a current of exhaustion. People are burning out not […]
Get a GRASP: How to Create Real Risk Visibility for AI Agents If you deploy an AI agent into production, it will make decisions with real consequences. It might approve a loan, schedule critical infrastructure maintenance, route emergency services, or allocate resources worth millions. And yet, most organisations have almost no systematic way to understand […]
Beyond Silicon Valley: Building AI Governance on the Fair Go Principle AI governance looks the same everywhere because the AI industry looks the same everywhere: concentrated in Silicon Valley, shaped by American values, and exported globally as though those values are universal. But they're not. The assumptions baked into American AI development—individual liberty over collective […]
Not Everything Needs an LLM There's a gravitational pull in AI right now: when you have a hammer called GPT-4, everything starts to look like a nail. A support ticket router? Obviously you need an LLM. A text classifier? LLM. A data extraction problem? LLM. It's understandable. Frontier models are impressive. They work across domains […]
Your Engineers Aren't Afraid of AI. They're Afraid of Becoming Junior Again. The conversation you'd expect when rolling out AI coding tools is straightforward. Your engineers are worried about job security. They're concerned about workflow disruption. They want to understand how this affects their career trajectory. These are legitimate concerns, and you plan to address […]
AI After an Apocalypse There's an unexamined assumption that has quietly become load-bearing infrastructure for entire categories of software: the internet is always on. This assumption used to matter mostly to mobile apps and remote workers. Now it matters to AI. An unreliable connection doesn't just interrupt your browsing. It interrupts your development workflow. You […]
Constitutional Prompting: Making AI Coding Agents Reliable Without the Iteration Tax AI coding agents are impressive when they work. They generate code that's functional, sometimes elegant, often exactly what you needed. But they often don't work on the first try. Getting them to generate the code you actually want usually requires iteration: generate, review, reject, […]
Spec Driven AI Development: A Real World Perspective on Getting Reliable AI-Assisted Code The difference between an AI system that generates useless code and one that reliably produces production-quality work often comes down to something surprisingly unglamorous: the specificity of the specification. When you give an AI agent a vague request—"build a user authentication system"—it […]
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve held AI and software engineering focused unconferences in Sydney and Melbourne. And we’ve got a write-ups of each of those (Melbourne and Sydney). But I thought I’d bring together a full report across both events to really try and capture where attendees thinking is at right now. So […]
Your Agent Doesn't Like Your APIs Years of API design have taught us that good design means simplicity for humans: clean REST endpoints, sensible hierarchies, well-structured JSON responses, and documentation that a developer can scan quickly. These principles have served us well. But there's a problem hiding in that success: APIs designed for humans often […]
Building SDKs in the Agentic Era The landscape of software development has fundamentally shifted. Once, an SDK was a relatively stable interface: you documented it, developers learned it, and for years it remained largely unchanged. But in the age of frontier AI models and coding agents, that stability evaporates. An LLM trained on your current […]
A Saturday in Sydney, seven sessions, ~40 practitioners, no speakers, no agenda — and conversations you can’t have at a normal conference. On Saturday 18 April 2026 we ran an AI unconference in Sydney. Same format as Melbourne the week before: cue cards, dot-voting, four corners of the venue, and the law of two feet […]
Date: Saturday 18 April 2026Venue: SydneyFormat: UnconferenceAttendees: ~40 practitionersGovernance: Chatham House Rule 1. How to Read This Report This report captures the breadth of discussion from six sessions held at the 2026 Sydney AI Unconference. Each section distils emergent themes and concrete insights, rather than attempting to record every comment. Attendees are not identified by […]
Stop Vibing Your Agents to Production: Applying ML Discipline to Agent Development There's a pattern in early-stage agent deployments that's become disturbingly common: someone gets an idea for what an agent should do, they start tinkering with prompts and parameters, they tweak and adjust until it seems to work, and then they ship it to […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
