Charlie O'Donoghue

I build small tools to think with, read further into a problem than it needs, and write up what I find so I stop forgetting it. The day job is architecture and delivery for large charging networks. This is the other half.

I'm a solutions architect, not a programmer. I decide what a tool is for and how it should behave, test it and live with it; Claude writes most of the code. Writing it myself is a dream I'm still working towards.

How I work

I'm interested in systems that settle. Feedback, dynamics, what makes a loop stop instead of wander. The agent work is one question: does this process have a quantity that only moves one way?

Using agents daily taught me one thing above the rest. What matters is the structure outside the model: durable records, state you declare rather than infer, and knowing where a human has to make the call. When I get it wrong, I inferred where I should have declared.

The same lens works on people. A team is a system with stocks you can't see on a balance sheet: trust, morale, the capacity anxiety quietly uses up. The Missing Ceremonies is my attempt to treat that seriously: three recurring meetings, read as feedback loops.

I adore programming languages, and the way each one introduced some clever part of computer science. Lisp most of all, which is how I ended up with Clojure. lineage is where I keep their stories.

Most of this started from a primary source, not a blog post. Understand the mechanism, build the small version. None of it is my field, which is the point.