A calmer professional feed

The thing I've found most challenging with AI-driven development is not building full stack, however complex that might be. It's actually the one area that appears to be simplest. I'm pretty ok with aesthetics, having spent several years at the start of my working life as a photographer. But UI (user interface) is unbelievably hard to get right, and I generally find AI pretty poor at it. There are plugins and skills to help, but they all tend towards a bland, Inter font, this-was-vibe-coded look. Nothing wrong with Inter (I use it a lot) but you generally know when a platform has had its inter

The shortcomings of GenAI are pretty well rehearsed now: hallucination (no, that's just wrong), counting (how many Rs in strawberry?), sycophancy, and bias.

Sharing with people here who have an interest in speaking to children about AI - a new 3-part booklet series called 'Talking about AI'. This was a collaboration between STEM Learning and Voice 21, which I authored. Booklets 1 and 2 are in the wild, and you can access a free copy here: https://community.stem.org.uk/blogs/shameel-khan/2026/04/20/what-can-oracy-and-ai-do-for-education

There is a story about a teacher who went to work in a school with no smartphones, no computers, and no digital devices of any kind.

Every so often someone names a problem so cleanly that it sharpens thinking you already had. @Carl Morris did that this week, writing about why good EdTech tools quietly fall out of use, and landing on the idea that the only product surface that really matters is the first thirty seconds of a teacher's Monday morning. His post points at an uncertainty that sits underneath a lot of planning in schools, and it made me reflect on why we built our system the way we did.

Security isn't always the most exciting topic, but it is one of the most important. Often it's something we as users of platform or teacher don't think about and we collectively all just assume our School admin has set it up security.

Quietly, I have been writing a book about AI, data governance, and higher education. I am trying to help people think about what they need to address as the shift to AI agents is happening quickly, while also acknowledging that many have not done much beyond saying “cheating is bad” in a banal way.