Reflections on four decades of programming, AI's impact on craft, and building things from scratch.
Acorn Playground has its own site, where both emulators run in your browser. The source for all of it is on GitHub. It started as MacBeeb, a BBC Micro emulator for the Mac. I’ve spent a lot of time in the BBC Micro’s internals through my Thrust and Exile proje…
You can download MacBeeb from GitHub, where the source is too. MacBeeb is a BBC Micro emulator written for the Mac in Swift. I’ve spent a lot of time in the BBC Micro’s internals through my Thrust and Exile projects, and I wanted an emulator that felt like a p…
WARD/EN is a programming game about sending autonomous drones into derelict spacecraft. You run the recovery ship, choose the contracts, fit the equipment and write the programs. Then you dispatch a drone and watch it put your decisions into practice. There ar…
You can play the demo and find out more at phosphor-game.com, or wishlist it on Steam. Phosphor is a real-time-with-pause tactical fleet game drawn in glowing wireframe on a CRT. You command a small convoy of named capital ships through a ten-node run across t…
I find coding assistants compelling. They are extraordinary tools, genuinely transformational and I use them daily, and I’m interested in what becomes possible as they continue to get better. I’m also a CTO. At some point I have to be willing to sign off on th…
Explore the language and its design at onus-lang.org. Onus is a programming language, and a development environment I’m building around it, that explores a question I keep coming back to as both a developer and a CTO: what gives me sufficient grounds to approv…
This is part of a pair of articles on the impacts of agent driven development - you can read thoughts on the review process here. I threw away the entire AI for Annhexation and started again. Annhexation is my 4X strategy game (which incidentally you can wishl…
This is part of a pair of articles on the impacts of agent driven development - you can read thoughts on backlog here. Excitement continues around coding assistants and we’re really now at the point where fully agentic loops are possible - pull a ticket, under…
Back in February I wrote a piece about the thing I loved changing. The short version: forty-two years in, the craft I built an identity around had been hollowed out. Not destroyed - hollowed. I was still building, but the interesting part, the part where you w…
You can play the game, and read all about how it works, at bbcexile.com. Exile has been with me for nearly 40 years. Written by Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith and published by Superior Software for the BBC Micro in 1988, it was doing things an 8-bit machine had…
I’ve been using coding assistants pretty much since they arrived on the scene and I’ve written about their impact on me personally previously. And while I find them incredibly useful I’ve noticed I’m starting to write more code directly myself again. The reaso…
Building a believable computer opponent for a 4X strategy game is one of those problems that turns out to be bottomless. I’d use the cliche it looks simple from the outside… but I don’t think thats true, I thought this would be a tough nut from the outset. I’v…
Source code available online here A claim that has gained traction lately is that Donald Trump’s posting patterns suggest “sundowning” — the late-day cognitive decline associated with dementia. The argument goes that his late-night and small-hours posting, oft…
Recently GitHub announced a change in pricing model for CoPilot which they’ve tried to wave away as not a price increase (because the list prices don’t move) but which really is as they are now charging for direct usage rather than per request. What’s interest…
Play the demo on Steam, or find out more on the game’s website. Annhexation is my take on a 4X strategy game: something you can pick up, make interesting decisions in, and finish in an evening. There’s a demo on Steam if you’d like to give it a go. In short: I…
The source code can be found on GitHub. In my previous post on neural networks we went through the basic concepts and simple mathematics involved in training and running a neural network. It’s so simple that it gave me an idea: could I run this on an 8-bit mic…
Having built a raycaster for my Wolfenstein 3D recreation I wanted to take things to the next level and build a “simple” ray tracer. The result is a real-time path tracer written entirely in WebGPU compute shaders, running in a browser, rendering levels loaded…
The source code is on GitHub. A real-time path tracer built entirely in WebGPU compute shaders — no RT cores, no ML denoisers, just maths and triangles. Woke up one morning and wanted to follow up the Wolfenstein 3D raycaster with a ray tracer… obviously Doom…
The leather jacket has no clothes. Jensen Huang stands on stage at GTC, basking in the adulation of an audience that treats product launches like religious experiences while NVIDIA’s market cap hovers north of four trillion dollars. The narrative being pushed…
The full source code for the neural network and the interactive demonstrations can be found on GitHub. Increasing numbers of us are turning to solutions based on neural networks to help us with a wide variety of tasks. From accelerating software development th…
I asked Claude to recreate the classic 1986 game Thrust for me in the browser. It created slop but then things spiralled out of control. Thrust was one of my favourite games on the BBC Micro — written by Jeremy C. Smith and published in 1986, it’s a deceptivel…
You can play the game online. Honestly this is one of those projects that I’m not quite sure where it came from. Thrust was one of my favourite games on the BBC Micro written by Jeremy Smith and published in 1986, it’s a deceptively deep game with amazing phys…
I wrote my first line of code in 1983. I was seven years old, typing BASIC into a machine that had less processing power than the chip in your washing machine. I understood that machine completely. Every byte of RAM had a purpose I could trace. Every pixel on…
This morning I had a ChatGPT conversation that started about engagement metrics and ended up with a systematic destruction of my identity. It was a wild, disturbing, but ultimately revealing ride that joined a few dots for me. The engagement problem We’re all…
You can play the game online. While working on the 8-bit console I got the itch to create a twin stick shooter. There’s some Geometry Wars in this and some Jeff Minter with a dash of Pink Floyd. Best thing to do is just go play it rather than me describe it! B…
You can play the game online. I was looking for a twin stick shooter and nothing quite scratched the itch — nothing in my Steam library anyway. I fired up Geometry Wars, enjoyed it, but it still wasn’t quite what I wanted. What it did give me was the spark to…
The source code for this can be found on GitHub here. Over the past few weeks I’ve been building a fully-playable 8-bit virtual console from scratch — CPU, instruction set, assembler, sprite system, IDE, the lot. One of the more interesting side quests has bee…
I’ve been itching to create some emulated 8-bit hardware for some time - not for an existing system but rather for my dream 8-bit system. However it always felt “too big” as I knew that I’d need tools like assemblers, graphics editors, and basically a whole lo…
I started programming on a BBC Model B as a kid — mostly for fun, mostly because it felt like a little world I could reshape. That hobby quietly turned into a career around 1994, and I’ve been building systems, tools, and odd little worlds ever since. I began…
The game can be played online and you can find the source code on GitHub. I have a long and storied (well, storied to me - anyone reading this drivel is probably thinking get over yourself) history with the classic mainframe game Star Trek. I first played it o…