RICH JAMES / CHIEF ENGINEER

Serious
engineering.
A curious mind.

AI, architecture and the art of making things work. Field notes from the code, not the sidelines.

Explore the writing A bit about me

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THE LATEST THINKING01 / FIELD NOTES

Nice knowing you SAST: a dinosaur faces a small robot introducing TypeSafe security scanning.

AI / IN FOCUS

Security Scanning for Pennies with Jev: The Missing Middle Between Regex and Reasoning Models

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IDEAS INTO IMPLEMENTATION.

AI, with a purpose.

Agentic systems and software that do useful work. Less theatre, more things that actually ship.

AI / AGENTS / SDLC

Built for the real world.

Architecture, cloud and engineering at enterprise scale. Where the interesting constraints tend to live.

ARCHITECTURE / CLOUD

Show your working.

Experiments, code and the occasional strong opinion. Notes from building, not just watching.

OPEN SOURCE / ENGINEERING

THE ENGINEERING NOTEBOOK

Fresh from the workbench.

The full archive

The hype machine: a theatrical mask above a spotlighted stage on a burgundy background.

AIJun 2026

The Dario Amodei Hype Machine: Mythos, Fable, and the Smell of an IPO

Anthropic promised the world a mythological AI overlord. What they delivered was a model that beat GPT-5.5 by a single point — then got banned by the US government three days later. Is this product development, or pre-IPO theatre?

10 min read Read the story

A visual comparison of a complex agent framework and a simpler Markdown-based approach.

AIFeb 2026

Frameworks vs Markdown: Why I Stopped Installing Agent Frameworks and Started Writing .md Files

There's a gold rush in AI-assisted development frameworks. I tried several, then built aibank using nothing but flat Markdown files and GitHub Copilot agents. Here's what I learned.

7 min read Read the story