Articles
Field notes from real projects across AI automation, product delivery, and growth execution.
Teaching Claude Code Your House Style with Agent Skills
Agent Skills let you put your team's conventions, workflows and checklists into a SKILL.md file that Claude Code loads when it needs it. Here's how skills differ from CLAUDE.md, why the description field matters so much, and the real skill we use to run this blog.
Website Accessibility: What the Equality Act Actually Requires
Your website counts as a service under the Equality Act 2010, and you have to make it accessible before anyone complains. UK enforcement is rare, but the lost customers are real, so we cover the £274bn Purple Pound, the four failures behind most broken sites, and a free ten-minute self-check.
Christmas Bookings Open in September
Office party organisers book in September and October, well before December. Here's what the booking data says, how deposits and pre-orders cut festive no-shows, and a September checklist for pubs and venues that want a full December.
Your Google Business Profile Is Your Real Homepage
Most customers choose your café, pub or salon from the Google panel before they ever see your website. Here's how to claim, fill in and look after your Business Profile so it can do the homepage's job properly.
The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Code
AI writes code fast, but what does it cost to look after over time? Data from GitClear, METR and Google's DORA programme shows measurable costs that most engineering organisations aren't tracking, along with practical ways to keep them down.
AI Coding Agents on Existing Codebases: A Practical Guide
Most AI coding content assumes you're starting a new project from scratch. This guide covers how to bring agents into an established codebase, from writing a good CLAUDE.md file and scoping each session to stopping the agent from rewriting everything and picking safe places to start.
When to Stop Vibe Coding and Hire a Developer
AI coding tools can get a startup to product-market fit, but they tend to stall on the last 20% of getting ready for production. Here's how to spot when you've reached that point, from security gaps to code you can't test, and what a good handover to a developer looks like.
You Built an App With AI. Who Checks It Before Real Users Show Up?
Vibe coding gets a working product into your hands without a development team, but it can't tell you whether that product is safe to launch. Here's why AI-built apps fail in predictable ways, what a vibe code review covers, and how a focused security pass helped Pactora hold up when it hit number one on vibecode.law.
GDPR and the Data Use and Access Act 2025 for Small Businesses: The Bits That Actually Apply to You
UK data protection law is less scary than the acronyms make it sound. Here are the few things a small business must do, plus the one cookie rule the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 made lighter from 5 February 2026.
Roll Your Own Cursor: Free Local AI Coding with Continue and oMLX
Cursor and Copilot cost a subscription and send every keystroke to someone else's server, but if you own an Apple Silicon Mac you can run the same ghost-text autocomplete and chat locally for free. This is how we set up Continue and oMLX, why the autocomplete model needs fill-in-the-middle support, and how to run two models at once without your Mac grinding to a halt.
The £0 to £5K Marketing Website: What Each Tier Actually Gets You
A marketing website can mean four quite different things that happen to share a name. We look at what each spend tier, from free DIY builders to a £5K custom build, buys a UK SME, and how to match the tier to the job your site has to do.
Is Your Website Too Slow? A Plain-English Speed Audit for Small Businesses
A ten-minute speed check you can do yourself, written for UK small business and hospitality owners who aren't technical. You'll use two free Google tools and your own phone to see what's slowing your site down, read the results without the jargon, and work out when it's time to pay a developer.
Automating the Boring Stuff: 5 Workflows Every Small Business Should Automate First
For a UK cafe, pub, builder or salon, the quickest return on tech usually comes from automating five repetitive admin jobs. We go through what each one costs by hand, the UK tools that do it, the compliance rules to watch, and one number to check it paid off.
Online Booking Systems for Small Businesses: What the Data Actually Says
Roughly half of all appointment bookings happen outside business hours, and UK hospitality loses £17.6bn a year to no-shows. We look at the published research on online booking from Square, Zonal, the NHS, GetApp and the Access Group, and what it means for pubs, salons and other small service businesses.
Stop Copy-Pasting Output Into Claude Code: Use the ! Shell Mode
Claude Code's bang prefix runs shell commands right in the session and adds the output to the conversation, so the agent can see what happened without you switching tabs or copying and pasting. It's a small habit to pick up, and it saves a lot of fiddling about.
Claude Code Hooks: Automate Your AI Coding Workflow
Claude Code hooks run shell commands for you at set points while the agent works, so files get formatted, risky commands get blocked, you get a ping when Claude needs you, and your project rules stick without you having to check each step.
Stop Hoarding Context: Why Fresh Sessions Make AI Coding Agents Better
Long AI coding sessions get worse as the context window fills up. This is a practical guide to managing sessions, using the /clear command, and keeping useful memory in CLAUDE.md so every fresh session starts with what it needs.
Prompts for Vibe Coders: A Practical Guide to Claude Code
Getting good results from vibe coding mostly comes down to knowing what to prompt. This is a practical guide to CLAUDE.md setup, prompt patterns that work, and the Frontend Design skill, for non-technical builders using Claude Code.
How to Get Notified When AI Agents Need Your Attention in iTerm2
Running AI coding agents across multiple terminal tabs means lost time when you miss a prompt. A three-minute iTerm2 configuration gives you native macOS notifications whenever an agent finishes and waits for input.
Build vs. Buy: A Decision Framework for Growing UK Businesses
Choosing whether to build or buy software is one of the biggest calls a growing UK business makes, and the hidden costs on both sides are easy to miss. Here's a simple framework for weighing up total cost of ownership, integration and how well each option fits what makes you different.
What Actually Goes Wrong in AI Integration Projects
Over 80% of AI projects fail, and the models are rarely the reason. We look at the five organisational, data and process problems that usually derail AI integration, drawing on research from RAND, McKinsey, Gartner and MIT.
How to Scope an MVP Without Wasting Your First £50K
35% of failed startups built something nobody wanted. This is a practical guide to scoping your MVP so you don't waste your budget, with UK cost benchmarks, a step-by-step way to prioritise, and clear ways to tell if it worked.
Core Web Vitals and Revenue: What the Data Actually Says
Vodafone, Rakuten, Swappie and others have published case studies that show a clear, measurable link between Core Web Vitals and revenue, and here are the actual numbers.
Choosing a Software Consultancy in the UK: A Buyer's Guide
A practical guide for UK business leaders comparing software consultancies, covering what to look for, what to avoid, how contracts work, and how to set up the first piece of work so your money is protected.