Hi, I'm Maxime Downe (aka maxitect on GitHub) — a London-based software engineer and AI systems builder who started out as an architect and ended up building rather different kinds of structures.
I'm co-founder of Tandem Creative Dev, where we build web applications, AI pipelines, and data platforms for public sector bodies, charities, and founders working on problems worth solving — recent work spans a national skills classification API for the Department for Education, an AI research platform for Gatsby Foundation, and NLP infrastructure for maritime safety data.
On this blog I write about what I'm actually building: multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, full-stack architecture decisions, and the practical realities of shipping AI products that work in production. Less theory, more what I learned when it broke.
Amazon's new KIRO tool landed with considerable fanfare this month, promising to transform AI-assisted development through "spec-driven workflows." I spent time experimenting with it and reached an…
We've now delivered our multi-agent AI workshop twice at Founders & Coders, where developers learn to build AI systems using LangGraph. This is our third AI workshop in a series, the first was about…
The web's discovery landscape is shifting. Where Google once reigned supreme, LLMs now increasingly serve as the primary interface between users and web content. This fundamental change demands new…
Four months ago, I completed the WAI0.1x: Introduction to Web Accessibility certification. What started as professional development quickly became a fundamental shift in how I approach web…
Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently suggested that threatening AI systems might improve their performance, a method I've decided to coin as "pressure prompting". I had to try this out for myself.…
Following our successful HULA framework workshops, we evolved the concept at Founders & Coders to explore a different challenge: how do development teams coordinate when each developer has their own…
This week, I attended a fascinating workshop at Founders & Coders led by a RAG and AI agent expert from Neo4j. I decided to attend because at Tandem, we're working on an AI IT helpdesk bot for Teams…
Claude Code has been touted as a powerful AI-assisted development tool, and according to Anthropic, the key to unlocking its full potential lies in a well-structured CLAUDE.md file. I've spent this…
A month ago, I had the chance to facilitate a workshop series at Founders & Coders with Jack Casstles-Jones, my co-facilitator, introducing developers to a new approach for building software with AI…
Following last week's thoughts on the lean coding style of data scientists, my second week at the Machine Learning Institute has been about debugging neural networks. Much like in E.M. Forster's The…
Having recently embarked on a machine learning bootcamp at the Machine Learning Institute (MLX), I've been struck by a fascinating contrast in coding styles. Having formally trained in software…