Why This Website?

This is my personal blog about building software with AI agents and tools: the day-to-day reality of it. Not the demos. Not the marketing. The real work, including the messy parts.

I'm a software developer, and I'm using AI in earnest across everything I do, from small features and stubborn bugs all the way up to starting my own software company, Iron Code Studios. That journey (building products, tools, and a business with AI as a genuine collaborator) is a lot of what I write about here.

Every article starts with something I actually did: a feature I shipped, a refactor I wrestled with, a tool I put through its paces, a decision I had to make. I write it up while the details are still fresh: the setup, the prompts, the dead ends, and whatever ended up working.

A bit of background

I've been coding for over 30 years, most of it as a hobby, for the pure joy of making the machine do something. I started out writing BASIC, moved on to C++ and Java, and in 2013 I picked up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and fell for the web.

In 2017 I launched my first genuinely successful website, dnddiceroller.com. It took me around 80 hours of hard, hands-on work. That number sticks with me, because today, with AI as a partner, that same kind of build takes a few hours. That shift is a big part of why this blog exists.

I started working seriously with AI about two years ago, and it changed how I build. In 2025 I registered my business, Iron Code Studios, finally turning a lifelong hobby into a profession. This site is where I document that transition, in the open.

What you'll find here

• Experiments: concrete things I built with AI, start to finish, including the parts that didn't work.
• Workflows & prompts: the habits and setups that make agents genuinely useful, and the anti-patterns that quietly burn my time.
• Building a company: notes from using AI to help start and run Iron Code Studios, from first prototype to shipping real products.
• Honest verdicts: where AI is a force multiplier for me, and where I still reach for a plain old function.

How I think about it

AI is a remarkably capable collaborator and a confident liar in equal measure. For me the value isn't in handing over the wheel; it's in staying human in the loop: setting clear intent, reading every diff, and verifying the claims before I trust them. That loop runs through everything I write about here.

I'm not here to prove AI can code. I'm here to figure out how I can build better software (and a better company) with it, and to be honest about the trade-offs along the way.

About this site

Fittingly, this blog practices what I preach. It's a fully static website with no backend, no framework, and no third-party dependencies: just hand-written HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, including a small custom Markdown renderer I wrote. Articles are plain .md files listed in a single JSON index, and the whole thing runs on Cloudflare Pages. Simple, fast, and easy to maintain.

Got a question, a correction, or a topic you'd like me to cover? Get in touch. I read everything.

Cheers, Arthur