Darren's working notebook on making AI work inside a real company.https://readycio.com/https://readycio.com/notes/ai-writes-instant-legacy-code/https://readycio.com/notes/ai-writes-instant-legacy-code/Code written with AI is being thrown away or rewritten within weeks at twice the old rate, and the share of code being refactored is falling. The draft is faster. Owning it is not.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/fast-food-architecture/https://readycio.com/notes/fast-food-architecture/AI is a very good drafter and a poor architect. Treating its output as finished engineering is like living on fast food: it works today and costs you later. The fix is a place the reasoning lives that the model can read back.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/the-build-is-the-cheap-part/https://readycio.com/notes/the-build-is-the-cheap-part/A tool built in 48 hours feels free until the first API change. The initial build was always the small share of the cost of owning software, and AI just made that share smaller.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/the-tool-nobody-in-it-knows-about/https://readycio.com/notes/the-tool-nobody-in-it-knows-about/Shadow IT used to be a spreadsheet. Now it is a working app that runs part of the business, built by one person with an AI tool, and that person is the only one who can change it.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/a-chatbot-for-everyone-is-not-a-strategy/https://readycio.com/notes/a-chatbot-for-everyone-is-not-a-strategy/It is the most common AI decision a company makes, and the most common place it stops. What the licence buys, what it does not, and the four things it quietly leaves undone.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/authorisation-in-the-database/https://readycio.com/notes/authorisation-in-the-database/Multi-tenant ticketing with row-level security, and why "you can only see your own company's tickets" belongs below the application code.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/make-the-tool-interview-you/https://readycio.com/notes/make-the-tool-interview-you/The cheapest review happens before the code exists. Three sentences that turn an AI coding tool from an eager builder into a careful interviewer, and when to use them.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/port-the-product-not-the-platform/https://readycio.com/notes/port-the-product-not-the-platform/Moving a CRM off a no-code tool means documenting every screen and automation first, then rebuilding the flows the team already knows, not the workarounds the platform forced.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/questions-to-ask-a-vendor-selling-ai/https://readycio.com/notes/questions-to-ask-a-vendor-selling-ai/The vendor has a demo. You need answers. Seven questions that separate an AI feature from an AI liability, and what a good answer sounds like.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/reading-is-the-job/https://readycio.com/notes/reading-is-the-job/What changed in my day when the typing stopped being the bottleneck, and the three places the time went instead.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/security-pass-that-runs-anyway/https://readycio.com/notes/security-pass-that-runs-anyway/Scheduled scans, nightly dependency matching, findings as tickets, fixes as reviewed pull requests. The shape of a security practice for a small team that ships with AI.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/the-app-is-the-visible-part/https://readycio.com/notes/the-app-is-the-visible-part/Companies that build or buy an AI feature usually stop at the feature. Three invisible parts decide whether it is an asset or a liability, and none of them is optional.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/the-coding-standard-is-a-file-the-tool-reads/https://readycio.com/notes/the-coding-standard-is-a-file-the-tool-reads/Three people building with AI produce three different codebases unless the standard lives somewhere the tool reads it every time. Not a wiki page. A file in the repo.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/the-employee-who-can-now-build-apps/https://readycio.com/notes/the-employee-who-can-now-build-apps/Someone in your company who is not an engineer has built something the business now relies on. It is an opportunity and the biggest new risk in most small firms. What to require before you rely on it.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/three-directions-in-an-evening/https://readycio.com/notes/three-directions-in-an-evening/A method for getting a real design choice out of a non-designer: stable option names, an honest tradeoff on each, and a fresh-eyes critic pass before anyone sees it.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/two-questions-before-a-human-reads-the-ticket/https://readycio.com/notes/two-questions-before-a-human-reads-the-ticket/Using a model to clarify vague support requests against a map of the client's systems, with a person still approving every ticket.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/what-a-company-keeps-when-the-coder-leaves/https://readycio.com/notes/what-a-company-keeps-when-the-coder-leaves/Git keeps the code. It does not keep the reasoning, the gotcha that cost a day, or why the last approach was abandoned. That is a different kind of backup, and most companies do not have it.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/where-the-rule-lives/https://readycio.com/notes/where-the-rule-lives/"You can only see your own company's tickets" is one sentence. Where a team chooses to enforce it decides whether the next feature can forget it. A story about moving a rule below the code, told for people who will never write a database policy.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/notes/your-staff-already-have-an-ai-plan/https://readycio.com/notes/your-staff-already-have-an-ai-plan/In most companies without a policy, AI is already in daily use on whatever data is to hand. That is not a discipline problem. It is the plan you get by not writing one.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/myvault/a-lesson-that-saved-itself/https://readycio.com/myvault/a-lesson-that-saved-itself/A short story about one note in the vault. Learned from a failing test, written the same afternoon, applied automatically on every project since. This is what "repeatable" looks like in practice.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/myvault/self-auditing/https://readycio.com/myvault/self-auditing/A knowledge base that nobody audits becomes a junk drawer within a quarter. How the vault checks its own links, flags weak entries, and forces contradictions to be resolved rather than accumulated.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/myvault/ten-notes/https://readycio.com/myvault/ten-notes/The first ten things to write down when you start a knowledge vault for AI-assisted work. Each one is a lesson your team has already learned and will otherwise relearn.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://readycio.com/myvault/vault-vs-readme/https://readycio.com/myvault/vault-vs-readme/Giving an AI coding agent a place to read from and save to across sessions and projects, and the conventions that stop it becoming a junk drawer.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT