I traded a chef's knife for a keyboard. The obsession with craft stayed.

I spent a decade as a professional chef: head chef in the French Alps, fast-paced kitchens across Belfast and beyond. That world taught me how to lead under pressure, obsess over detail, and ship consistently. When I picked up code, those instincts came with me.

Today I build AI systems that have to work in production rather than in a demo. Much of that has been for regulated, security-sensitive organisations: places where the data is not allowed to leave the building, where an agent's reach has to be bounded on purpose, and where “the model said so” is not an answer anyone accepts. It is a demanding way to learn the job, and a good one.

The work itself is the awkward middle of AI delivery: agent architecture, evaluation, guardrails and cost control, plus the full-stack engineering to actually get it shipped. LLMs, RAG, retrieval, the lot. I take on a small number of engagements at a time so each one gets proper attention.