About Jamie

There was one computer in my school. A Research Machines 380Z, kept in its own room like a holy relic. I talked my way in front of it and wrote BASIC games, and the thing that hooked me wasn't the games. It was the loop. Type a line, run it, watch it do exactly what I told it or fail in a way that was entirely my fault. Honest feedback. I have been chasing that loop ever since.

I got a VIC-20 and the obsession set hard. When I left school I took a job in the computer room at Sperry Univac, mostly because it was the closest I could get to the machines. I talked my way into a trainee operator role, then into systems programming: writing operating systems, file handlers, real-time transaction systems for banks, all in assembler. I earned a computing degree along the way. It was pure joy.

This was before the abstractions arrived. No relational databases. No debuggers. No full-screen editors, so we wrote our own, because there wasn't one to buy. You worked close to the metal because there was nowhere else to stand.

I rode the changes as they came. I sat next to programmers who had written assembler for twenty-five-year careers, and I watched the ground shift under all of us: assembler to C to C++, hierarchical database handlers to relational. I kept up fine.

Then I got scared. I was in my thirties and keeping up, but only just. I had watched languages turn over faster than the people using them, and I could see where it ended: well before fifty I'd be cooked, no longer writing the real thing, just dragging and dropping other people's components. The joy would be gone. So I retreated into management, on the theory that people change more slowly than syntax. Twenty years of the conventional kind of success followed. Good title, good money, and something quiet died in the middle of it. The loop was gone. I had stopped living in the gap between effort and outcome and started managing it from a distance.

Then AI handed my first love back.

It carries the cognitive load I was afraid of, and I supply what it can't: vision, discipline, the judgement of what's worth building in the first place. The thing I had written off as obsolete, my old-school engineering discipline and the strategic thinking the management years gave me, turned out to be the missing piece. I am more creative now, past fifty, than I was in my twenties. One person, a studio, building in public.

This is the part of the page that used to promise you a billion-pound portfolio and a stack of AI businesses by 2030. I have killed that goal. Not because it was too ambitious. Because it was the wrong shape.

Here is what changed my mind. Hundreds of millions of people now get their understanding of the world from a handful of similarly-trained models. The advice comes back confident, reasonable, and identical for everyone. When the machine hands the whole crowd the same play, the play stops paying. The range of what people think is narrowing toward one moderate, conviction-free answer, and in that world the scarce thing, the only defensible thing, is the ability to keep your own mind. Sovereign first-person judgement, grounded in real depth. I call it cognitive sovereignty, and I think it is the bet worth making.

I am an odd fit to make it, which is exactly the point. I learned to code at the metal while the rest of the world abstracted upward into vibe-coded slop, and I kept the discipline. I wrote the best-selling book on business continuity in the world, so I know precisely how a monoculture fails: quietly, then all at once, everyone together. And I teach mindfulness and I coach, so the inner half of "keep your own mind" isn't a metaphor to me. Three different lives, one pattern underneath them: the depth that each new abstraction layer quietly erased, and that I happened to hang on to.

So I am not building an empire. I am building a body of work, in the open. I build things to learn, not to sell, and I give the code away. I share what worked, what didn't, and why, including the products I have killed off in full public view. The value was never the software. It is the judgement and the trust, and those only compound if I show my working.

If you want a number, here is the audacious one: a million people who trust me as their primary source for making sense of AI. Not followers. Not vanity metrics. People who have checked my numbers, used my tools, and decided the signal was worth the subscription. I am starting from roughly none of those, with a full-time bank job, which is either bold or daft. Probably both. The target points me in a direction. The practice is what makes it durable: ride the wave, learn what's real, share it honestly.

If I recommend it, I am using it. If it failed, you will hear about the failure before you hear about the win. My code is open for you to check. That is the whole offer.

I am in the water. If you would rather learn from someone actually riding the wave than someone selling theory from the beach, stay a while. I will tell you what's working before you waste the time finding out yourself.