James Studdart
I build software agentically. AI does the volume; the architecture, the trade-offs and the awkward decisions stay mine. Products that used to need a team and half a year now need neither, whether I am building yours, putting AI inside it, or bringing your team round to working the same way.*
*The cynicism is a feature, not a bug.
Most software doesn't fail in the code.
It fails in the decisions made before anyone opened an editor, and in how long it took to admit those decisions were wrong. I've shipped products that worked and watched others quietly eat two years before being switched off. The difference was almost never technical.
Agentic-first development
My work starts with a specification, not a ticket. What the thing must do, what it must never do, and how anyone will know it works, written down and agreed before an agent touches the code. The spec is what gets argued over and corrected, because a misunderstanding costs far less to fix in a document than in a codebase.
Agents then take the volume: scaffolding, migrations, test coverage, the tedious ninety percent, all of it building against something precise rather than a vague instruction. The architecture, the trade-offs and the decision about what not to build stay with me. What changes is the arithmetic, and the fact that at the end you own a written account of why the software is the way it is.
I build it
You get the output of a team without the headcount, and one person who is accountable when it does not work. Products, internal tools, the thing that has been on the roadmap for two years.
AI inside your product
Agents, language models and on-device inference built into the thing you actually sell, rather than bolted on afterwards because the board asked what you were doing about AI.
Your team, working this way
Your developers already know your domain. I help them work spec-first, so the agents have something exact to build against and the speed does not turn into a very fast mess.
Vocalink
VocalinkSelect text in any app, press ⌥⌘R, and Vocalink reads it aloud in a natural voice, generated on your own machine rather than in someone else's cloud. Emails, pull requests, documentation: anything you would rather hear than read.
I built it because I was losing afternoons to text I could have been listening to. Now it is a product you can buy.
15-day free trial, then £29.99 once · macOS 14+ · Apple silicon
Cynically Optimised
I host The Cynical Developer, a podcast about the parts of building software that don't make it into the sales deck: the trade-offs, the mistakes, and the things that only look obvious afterwards. Years of episodes and a lot of very patient guests later, it's still the best excuse I have to ask clever people awkward questions.
I co-host Tabs and Spaces as well. If you want to know how I think before you hire me, that's the shortcut. It's all out there, largely unedited.
The full work history, the
recommendations from people who had to work with me, and the
easiest way to reach me if a form feels like too much.
Connect and tell me what you're building. I answer.
Github
Published code, side projects, and the occasional thing built at 1am because it annoyed me. A fair sample of how I write things when nobody is watching.
The stack follows the problem
Languages are the easy part. I have delivered in .NET and C#, Python, JavaScript, Dart and Swift, and learned whatever else a job turned out to need. Being fluent in one framework matters far less than getting productive in an unfamiliar one quickly, and working spec-first has made that faster again.
More than a developer
Writing the code is rarely the whole job. I've led teams, run delivery, done the branding, and had the uncomfortable conversation about the feature that needs cutting.
Much of that work has been in-house software that companies run their operations on, across global pharmaceuticals, security and e-learning. The kind of systems that never get a launch party and stop the business dead if they go down.
One person who can do all of that is usually cheaper, and considerably faster, than three who each do one part of it.
People I've worked with
Clients, colleagues, and one or two people who had the job of managing me.
Let's talk about your project
Whether it's a product that needs building properly, one that has stalled and nobody wants to say so, or a team that needs a second opinion, tell me what you're dealing with.
If I'm the right person, I'll say so and we'll work out what it takes. If I'm not, I'll tell you that too, and usually point you at someone better suited. That part is free.
