The Agency's Code Consultancy

The Curveball

I have 30 years of experience in this industry and have seen many different ebbs and flows over that time but nothing quite like what we are seeing today, AI is gathering momentum at pace and opinion is somewhat polarised. Recently I have decided to pivot - five years ago I was a contractor/freelancer and during Covid had to switch back to working as an employee, that was a tough decision at the time, as I had to close up shop, my business of nearly 20 years had to be put on hold - then I got comfortable.

The problem is being “comfortable” is not always a good thing because recently a number of us were made redundant, the economy is in a state of flux across the world and a number of companies have found AI to be their answer to cost-cutting. Once again I found myself in a situation, asking myself, “What now?”.

It dawned on me that I can take a different tack, which has becoming more and more obvious as searching for another full-time job is now so much harder than it used to be, there are more layers to break through, more tests, more interview stages, so why don’t I explore a wider gamut of options?

I have long been mulling over the idea for HeadForCode, to the point that I have been sitting on the domain I registered ages ago gathering dust; until now that is because you’re reading this! I am busy developing this site an iteratively conceiving a whole new business but one that isn’t entirely traditional. Living on the cusp of the moment.

Many people are confused about AI, many think it’s the destroyer of all jobs and I have thought that too, did it take my job of five years? Was that the reason? Or were they merely cost cutting in order to sell the business? It does not matter because it has really freed me up to pursue better things.

The next chapter

I am far more open-minded when it comes to seismic shifts in technology and is AI really the new Industrial Revolution or just a fad? We as humans have seen this all before in the eyes of progress, AI is indeed one of the biggest changes and I feel it is better to embrace it where it can be useful but to be wise about what you do. There are always so many (most) tasks that I feel are far better conducted by a talented creative than an AI agent but automation is where I see the value.

I am a one man band as a business, an independent software developer and consultant. I can only do so much at once and have been gradually testing out, well actively using Claude Code in order to run some parallel tasks, compressing many hours of work into a shorter space of time. I still review all of the code it generates and I still write a lot from scratch. So I can see the value of this technology for small businesses, especially a band of one like myself.

Then making use of something like Claude puts me in a position where I cab pass in this new knowledge to others who want to get their head around it in the context of building applications and websites for small businesses an projects.

The tools I use

I work a lot with JavaScript (shifting into TypeScript) more nowadays than ever before along with front-end frameworks such as Vue, Nuxt, React, Next and Astro - this site for example is made using Astro and React with TinaCMS for managing the content and writing this article, all of which is hosted on Netlify. Other tools used here are Tailwind for the CSS, HTML of course and then there is Netlify Forms and Buttondown for the newsletters (why not sign up).

Many of the hosting platforms, such as Netlify now provide AI tools, take for example this article on their website, to aid you in deployment, fixing issues and they also now have an MCP server, another concept that is becoming more commonplace, as “context” is what drives the more focused LLM systems.

I can now use it as a way of spinning up new sites that are based on one of the starter kits I have been building, such as HeadForCode itself.

Helping Agencies

My goal is to help you build web projects more efficiently and to better understand how that takes place. Not every client of course is going to be based on “starter kit” approach because I can help you spec out your requirements using AI as a tool to lay down those foundations and develop a solution that is scalable and help support you during the project’s entire lifecycle and beyond.