Who Am I

I've spent thirty years noticing things before other people do.

Not because I'm smarter. Because I pay attention differently. I watch systems, not surfaces. The pattern underneath the pattern. And I've learned to trust when something feels off — or feels early.

That instinct has shaped everything I've built.

The Through-Line

In 2005, I started building websites and apps when most businesses still thought the internet was a brochure. In 2011, I opened a cookery school in the UK — hands-on skill transfer, the kind of thing that's now called "embodied education" by people who discovered it last year. By 2015, I was deep in crypto — not as a speculator, but as someone fascinated by what happens when you remove middlemen from money.

Each time, I wasn't chasing a trend. I was following a thread that made sense to me before it made sense to the market.

The same thing happened with AI. Except this time I'd been waiting for it.

Twenty Years of Thinking About Thinking

My degree was computer science, but not the kind most people imagine. I specialised in artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and nature-inspired computing — genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, systems that learn by mimicking biology. This was the early 2000s. AI wasn't a product. It was a question.

The question that hooked me then still drives my work now: how do we think about our own thinking?

That's metacognition. The ability to observe your own reasoning — to notice when you're stuck, biased, or outsourcing your judgment to something else. It's rare. AI is making it rarer, because the tool makes it easy to stop thinking. And it's the exact skill that separates people who direct AI from people who follow it.

I've been studying this for twenty years. Long before everyone suddenly needed it.

Fifteen Years Inside a Practice

I co-founded an architecture studio and ran it for over a decade. I wasn't the architect — I was the one who built the systems, found the clients, and watched what happened when creativity met reality.

I watched briefs die in transit. I watched everything route through one person because their judgment lived nowhere else. I watched a practice's voice get diluted by tools that didn't know who it was.

Those fifteen years are why I build what I build now. The problems weren't technology problems. They were knowledge problems — the most valuable thing in the business trapped in one head, leaking away at every handoff.

The Generalist Thing

I've collected domains my whole life. Computer science, architecture, property, food, crypto, music production, carpentry, photography, philosophy. Any specialist in any one of these knows more than I do about their corner.

For thirty years that felt like a flaw. Imposter syndrome, the whole way through — in a room full of architects and not an architect, talking to developers and not a "real" developer. Knowing enough about everything to be dangerous, never enough about one thing to belong.

Then AI made execution a commodity, and the value flipped. The scarce skill stopped being depth in one lane. It became seeing the connections between lanes — the thing my brain had been doing the entire time.

I don't have imposter syndrome anymore. Not because I changed. Because the world caught up.

I Use What I Sell

I make music under the name Roddington Pear. AI handles the production layer. The words, the meaning, the taste — that's mine, every syllable. The same principle runs through everything: the tool follows, it can't lead. It amplifies what you bring or it amplifies nothing.

I write about all of this — the divide forming between people who originate and people who assemble, what survives when production is free, why imperfection is where the humanity lives. The thinking is public. Read it here →

What I Do Now

I build brains for businesses.

I take a company's tacit knowledge — how they work, decide, talk — and compile it into a structured intelligence they own. Model-agnostic, queryable through any AI, app-consumable. The output carries their fingerprint, not the model's. Then I build custom apps on top of it — the quoting tool, the client portal, whatever the bleeding problem is.

The first vertical is skalm.space — brains for architecture practices. Built from those fifteen years of watching exactly where the knowledge leaks.

Thirty years of pattern recognition, twenty years of studying how people think, fifteen years inside a real business. That's what goes into the work. The AI is just the part everyone can see.