Hi, I'm James.
Staff Engineer. I design AI systems that have to be trusted, from online safety to security, and I write about building them well.
I've spent nearly 20 years building software, and I write about architecture, building with AI, AI oversight, and Staff-level engineering leadership.
Recent writing
- Open sourcing PDQ: a .NET port, and the paperwork behind it
· How we searched perceptual image hashes at scale without a binary vector database, why we ported Meta's PDQ to .NET, and why open sourcing it took longer than writing it.
- GitHub Agentic Workflows: running AI against your repos, safely
· How gh-aw's safe outputs work, how I use it to check SDLC compliance, and the question it raises about speed versus spend.