Training · OpenMic · DevOps SDLC

Teaching engineers to work with the machine, not behind it.

Most of what I teach is one idea: never ship what you cannot explain in your own words. AI makes the typing cheap. It does not make the judgement cheap.

The ladder

Six stages of AI-assisted development.

People climb one wall at a time. Training has to meet them at the wall they are actually at, not the stage above it.

  1. stage 1Prompting
  2. stage 2Meta-prompting
  3. stage 3Copy-paste building
  4. stage 4IDE integration
  5. stage 5Context engineering · TDD · harness
  6. stage 6Multi-agent systems

The full essay →

The course

DevOps SDLC, in four parts.

Approved by leadership, then widened: roll the practices out across projects, measure the improvement, and keep tracking it. I am answerable for whether the measurement holds up — which is why compliance and outcome are reported as two things.

01

Development & branching

Prompt with intent. Read every diff hunk. Keep changes minimal. Never push what you cannot explain in your own words.

02

Testing & measurement

Measurement before automation. A test is a claim about behaviour; know what it cannot see.

03

Deployment & versioning

Releases you can reason about: tags, promotion, and rollbacks that announce themselves.

04

Planning & sprints

Plans that survive contact with AI-accelerated work, and reports that keep compliance and outcome apart.

Why measuring adoption is harder than rolling it out →

OpenMic

Every employee speaks at least once.

A weekly Thursday series I co-founded with a colleague at the firm, north-starred on every employee speaking at least once. Each session is recorded, promoted with a poster, summarised on one page, and archived.

  • 29 Apr 2026From AI Slop to Systems: six levels of automationGuru · founding session
  • 13 May 2026AI for Developersa colleague
  • 27 May 2026AdTech 101a colleague
  • 10 Jun 2026Speech therapy through inclusive AIa colleague
  • 8 Jul 2026Kafkaa colleague
  • 5 Aug 2026AI classification evaluationa colleague
  • 2 Sept 2026DevOps SDLC 1/4 — Development & branchingGuru
  • 10 Sept 2026DevOps SDLC 2/4 — MeasurementGuru
  • 16 Sept 2026DevOps SDLC 3/4 — DeploymentGuru

Delivered at the firm where I work. Colleagues' sessions are listed without names.