New year, new everything

I haven’t posted in 3 months! That’s partly because I put a lot of work into the extended version of my Agentic AI security post on martinfowler.com - and partly as since posting that I have changed jobs. After 2 years at Liberis I’ve decided to move on - on Monday I start a new position as a Principal Engineer at John Lewis Partnership!

I’m quite excited about the new position - John Lewis Partnership are a fascinating organisation - employee owned and with quite a strong set of values and ethics, and their software engineering group sounds like they have a good culture - I especially like their published engineering principles.

But as a result of this, most of my spare time in the last 3 months was taken up with the job process, and then winding up and handing over work at Liberis has kept me busy - as well as all the usual chaos of Christmas. I’ve still been having lots of fun playing with Agentic AI tools, keeping up with the changes, rolling my eyes at the hype.

It is traditional in a new year to ruminate on the state of things - and there’s a lot to ruminate on. We seem to be in a time of huge change.

AI is both a blessing and a curse. The AI hype continues - I have a whole draft blog post about “AI Hype 2.0” which I hope to write some day - but despite being annoyed at the hype, I have to admit AI tools have changed my work drastically. In October 2023 I was posting here about how Cursor was handy but couldn’t really tackle complex rust code - I don’t think I would have believed you if you’d told me that in 2 years I’d be using AI assistance for pretty well all my software development - and most of my non-development work as well.

But - AI slop and misuse is a huge risk, as is the IP theft in so much creative AI use, as is the high risk of the AI bubble bursting, and the fact that horrible tech-bro fascist-leaning maniacs are profiting from all this. And they are burning fossil fuels to power the engines behind this. (see also my standard AI Disclaimer)

Meanwhile governments are sliding towards fascism and imperialism, while funding the horrible tech oligarchs … it’s all a mess. While the planet burns. There are glimmers of hope, but it’s tough times and going to be horrible times for many people.

I don’t really have time or space to talk a lot about this right now, but I don’t want to ignore it and just post blithely about neat stuff I’ve done with rust scripts. The world is a mess and we all need to think about and talk about and work towards trying to fix it.

Happy 2026 and I hope it’s a good one for y’all out there!