• in AI
  • 5 min read

Is “AGENTS.md Engineering” The Next Optimisation Approach?

AGENTS.md has become the de facto standard for directing your agent. Claude Code had CLAUDE.md but with AGENTS.md becoming part of the Agentic AI Foundation last year, even Claude Code now recognises and uses AGENTS.md. But the benefits of AGENTS.md are now being discussed and challenged in academic circles. However, maybe what’s being discussed is just the first iteration. And just as the AI world went through Prompt Engineering and then Context Engineering, maybe the next phase (or a next phase) is “AGENTS.md Engineering”.

  • in Domino
  • 3 min read

Lessons in Effecting Change - How We Got A Domino Non-Production Server License

More than ten years ago, Christian Guedemann and I worked with various IBMers to try to get a free Domino server entitlement for developers. It took time - not an unacceptable amount of time, in my personal opinion - but we got more than we hoped. The dev and test server license is no longer available, because licensing for customers changed. Some are critical of that decision. But none, as far as I’m aware, have demonstrated taken the high-agency mindset that Christian and I demonstrated and which is crucial to effect change.

  • in AI
  • 6 min read

Transforming Software with AI

The ability of AI to generate software applications has taken gigantic leaps forward in just the last few months. A team of agents using Claude Opus 4.6 wrote a C compiler with minimal human interaction. In the press release for Opus 4.6 Anthropic build Claude with Claude. I personally use coding agents more and more, and I’ve seen significant rapid application development with AI.

  • in AI
  • 5 min read

AI and The High-Agency Mindset

It was only late last year that I heard the term "high-agency mindset", even though it's nearly a decade old. But after learning about it, I started to recognise signs to some extent in myself and some others I know. It became understandable why high-agency individuals surround themselves with other high-agency individuals, and why they can become frustrated with low-agency individuals. Where others see blockers and wait for (or expect) someone else to clear them, high-agency mindset individuals can see solutions or expect people to take responsibility for resolving them - or else they just go around them. It’s a mindset that aligns well with the concept of Directly Responsible Individuals or DRIs.

But it also became apparent that AI could have a big impact on the future of the two high-agency and lower-agency individuals.

  • in AI
  • 3 min read

AI and Marketing Content

The Microsoft Revolution

About 20 years ago there was a major shift in document processing which had profound repercussions for the AI world, years before it started. With Office 2007, Microsoft made a major change in their document formats. Up until that point, Microsoft had preferred closed, proprietary, customer lock-in of content into silos of information. But during the 2000s the rise of Apache OpenOffice and its open document formats, along with governmental demands for interoperability, put pressure on Microsoft to introduce OOXML. Of course it had added benefits - competition alone rarely encourages change. The new format was up to 75% smaller, improved corruption recovery and improved security.

  • in AI
  • 6 min read

AI, Tailwind, and The Future of Media

Recently there was an announcement that Tailwind was laying off 75% (3 of 4) of its engineering team because of revenue collapse. The initial hint came from a comment on a PR and was followed up with a podcast on X. This has caused a lot of discussion in the IT world. But I want to take a different approach. What does this mean for the media industry and the future of how we find out news?

  • in AI
  • 10 min read

AI Coding - Thoughts About The Future of Development

Vibe coding is probably the term of the year. Since being coined by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February the term has gained widespread adoption. My job is research, so I'm not one to accept code without review. But I absolutely need to be aware of new technologies and approaches, and evaluate their usefulness. And all technologies improve over time. So AI-assisted coding has been a regular part of my work for 18 months. Over recent weeks I've used it more and more, for a wide variety of purposes. And research is not just about trying things, it's about extrapolating and anticipating future usage.

  • in AI
  • 8 min read

Effective AI Usage: Understanding Brains

I've talked about the (current) moving parts of AI and AI-fu. But a fundamental aspect of AI-fu is being aware of how we think and how that's different to how LLMs "think". It's probably true that most people are not consciously aware of how they think or aware of how colleagues thinking works differently. So it's well worth raising that topic, because it's crucial to the quality of results.