Making unreliable systems behave.

-cide means killing. Chrome means the fancy stuff — the trim, the bells, the whistles.

I picked the name a long time ago to describe how I wanted to work: strip off the ornamentation and get to what is actually real. It has held up better than most things I believed in my twenties.

I play games, and then I take them apart. That is usually the sequence. Minecraft got the most of it — maps, mods, and eventually an event registry for a scripting engine that did not have one, because the alternative was accepting that it could not be done. Before that it was alternate reality games, which I played obsessively and then could not stop analysing: why this one stalled, what the puppetmaster should have done, how I would have run it differently. In 2015 I taught a toy wifi tank to take voice commands, for no particular reason.

It is the same thread that runs through the work, though I would do it either way: I cannot leave a system alone once I know there is more in it than the people who built it used. That is not discipline. I genuinely cannot turn it off.

I left school at seventeen and went to work. No degree, no bootcamp.

Programming started with a stranger on IRC who capitalised every letter of every sentence. I asked him why. He said it was a habit from writing VB6. A long conversation later he had sent me a copy and taught me the basics. Within a month the ISP in the small Queensland town I was living in paid me to write a program for their install discs, to help customers pick a plan. They paid in internet access.

By 2000 I was runninga regional web portal for the Darling Downs — hosting, banner advertising, a business directory, an events calendar, the local cinema timetable. I built and hosted sites for businesses around the district. Selling free web space door to door was harder than it sounds, mostly because the web was not going to last.

My first full-time development job came in the early 2000s, atCode Creations in Albury–Wodonga.

I cut my teeth on ambiguity. There were no standards and no best practice.

Browsers disagreed about nearly everything, so you wrote JavaScript and VBScript side by side and worked out what each one could actually do. You learn a specific discipline from that: write to capability rather than to documentation, assume nothing, and build the layer that makes the mess behave.

The rest of that decade was web development and IT management — content systems, project and resource management tools, the ordinary plumbing of small companies.

In February 2009, Black Saturday took the emergency services websites down under load. I started pulling data off them while they were up, and from anywhere else I could find, into a live map of the fires. Someone else was doing the same thing. We never spoke — we just started seeing each other’s updates appear, and between us kept what had become a single map current. Afterwards I built it out intoa crowdsourced incident reporting platform. It never took off.

In 2010 my family needed to move back to the country, so I asked whether I could do the job from there. The answer was yes, and I have worked remotely ever since.

Then support management software behind a retailer’s technical support desk, and the whole web stack for a gamified gym — API, admin, mobile app, mobile web, servers.

At FitzroyIT I started as a contractor, went from developer to senior developer, and stepped into technical lead when the lead left. The work was integration. PREP, the system behind the Australasian Recycling Label. The system that runs replacement buses when Metro and V/Line trains cannot. The tablet controller for a McLaren Speedtail’s wireless charger. Not much in common, except that none of them were allowed to fall over.

Like most people in this industry, I spent a long time assuming I had fooled everyone. Self-taught, no credential to point at, able to make things work but unable to explain how I knew what to try — which felt a lot like luck, and luck runs out.

Then language models arrived — undocumented systems, hard constraints, unreliable by nature, and they have to be made dependable regardless.

I started building with them in 2023, and went into agentic systems full time at Brand Ninja in January 2024. Since early this year I have been a founding software engineer at an early-stage company, building AI-first. Six months in: a subscription platform, a companion mobile app, and a playable collectible card game.

Two and a half years ago I asked Claude what AI-first software development would look like if it designed the process itself. I have been building the answer since — Bonsai, a content-addressable property graph where the graph is the repository, and code, issues and docs are just ways of serialising it. Self-hosting spec, Python reference implementation, Go engine, MCP server. Alongside it,plumbing for protocols never designed to talk to each other, which is most of them.

The doubt went away somewhere in there, and not because I got better. I had spent twenty-five years unable to stop thinking about six things at once, which in most jobs is a liability you learn to hide. Then the work became running a fleet of agents that all need watching, correcting and re-pointing at the same time. It turned out that was the shape of my head all along.