About
Robbie Smith
I am a solution architect and builder with a background in enterprise platforms and Salesforce. More recently I have been spending a lot of time working out how AI-assisted engineering can be made genuinely useful without lowering the standard we expect from software.
What I do
Turn messy problems into systems people can build and operate.
Most of my career has involved architecture: understanding the real problem, finding the constraints that matter, making decisions explicit, and giving delivery teams a structure they can execute against.
That same instinct is what pulled me into AI engineering. LLMs are remarkably good at some parts of the job and remarkably unreliable at others. I am interested in designing the surrounding system so we can use the strengths without pretending the weaknesses are not there.
This site
A place to publish what survives contact with reality.
I write when an idea has become useful enough to explain clearly. Some of it comes from successful work. A lot of it comes from things that failed first.
The aim is simple: publish the lessons that are useful beyond the project that produced them.