Humans have been writing code for a long time now, and we've gotten pretty good at it.

Not only have we come up with abstractions built on top of abstractions (to avoid having to write the kind of machine code that the computer itself reads), but we've evolved tooling and workflow conventions which have gradually supplanted all competitors until they became the accepted norm for software development.

But humans aren't writing all the code anymore. The AI revolution is real, indeed it's already happened – and now the world's foremost code storage platforms are struggling to keep up. GitHub recently posted a blogpost acknowledging their struggle to survive the onslaught of automated traffic hitting its servers. Large software projects and their leadership are announcing their lack of confidence in the traditional platforms for code collaboration (full disclosure: I work for one of these platforms) and, even discounting all the hype, the impact of all this stuff really does feel like it's significant, this time.

I keep hearing about "software factories", eg. the creation of an autonomous set of tools and pipelines so even the least-technical person with an idea can prompt a set of AI agents to spin up a new software project, launch strategy, user ticketing system and roadmapping functionality. The term "factory" feels pejorative to me: I don't want to be a factory boss, like some Marxian nightmare, harnessing the output of my army of robot agents. There's a brewery whose beers I enjoy, but whose name I despise: Bristol Beer Factory. I want my beer brewed by some nerd who can tell Nelson from Hallertauer just from the hop aroma, not churned out by a "factory".

Forgive me, Father for I have sinned. It’s been one year since my last newsletter.

I kind of know how this happened.

Last March I started a new job. I was in at the deep end: my first time working for an actual tech company, after fifteen years of being a software engineering professional. I suddenly had a lot on my plate, and a lot to prove.

I also decided that a good use of the leftover redundancy money from my 2024 layoff was to finally get hitched Civil Partnered with my beloved Madeleine. That day in early September 2025 was amazing and special and I’m so glad we did it, but it was also intense, stressful and tiring (just like being married to me, I imagine).

Last week I went to church.

My family brought me and my sisters up as Christians, attending church each Sunday morning and all of us coming to play parts in the various functions of the local parish: kids helping run Sunday School and singing in the choir for weddings; parents organising the music for services and holding leadership roles within the church structure. It was a big part of everyone’s life for a while back there.

None of us attend regularly any more, though I think the rest of my family still maintain their faith in their own way. Once I finished secondary school, I went through all the teenage atheist clichés and haven’t really thought about it since.

Faith has come up again recently in a few ways, though. My son is almost six and is exposed to a wide range of religions and cultural practices, one of the reasons we love living where we do. I found out recently, though, that a group of local Christian leaders have been coming into his school to run “Open The Book” sessions – a national program where kids are taught Bible stories, often dressing up and recreating them.

Killing time with a toddler is mind-bendingly dull.

Sure, there are moments of intense beauty and wonder as you revel in your child’s awestruck delight at something as trivial as a cardboard box or the reflection from some coloured glass. You can put on a piece of music or favourite film and watch their brain expand almost in real time, as new thoughts and experiences stimulate their cerebral cortex¹. Even the hardest of hearts will soften as they watch a 22-month-old stagger around the dining room wearing a princess dress and clutching a toy monkey. But also: it can be soul-crushingly boring, too.

Our daughter was off nursery with a virus for most of this week, which left me with long mornings to fill while we waited for her to recover. Sitting around the house is a recipe for a boredom-induced breakdown, so I resolved to chuck her in the pushchair and go for a walk in the April sunshine.

I’m reading a new book at the moment called John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. It’s about the two famous songwriters and how the music of the Beatles defined their relationship.

The popular conception is that John Lennon was the troubled genius whose spiky wit gave the Beatles their edge, and Paul McCartney was the people-pleasing cheeky chappie, writing mainstream-friendly hits and propping up the band during the final years of Lennon’s descent into heroin and avant-garde. This book aims to dispel some of these stereotypes, and uses the songs of the Beatles as hooks to dig into the relationship between John and Paul and how it informed their lives.

As both a huge Beatles fan and also an amateur songwriter who’s played music with lots of other beardy men who wish they were Lennon/McCartney, the premise of this book alone is right up my street. Watching the footage from the Get Back documentary, showing a month in the life of the Beatles as they try to coax another album out of their increasingly-unwilling selves, I was struck by the same observation that Ian Leslie makes with his book: John and Paul really do communicate through music.