David Curlewis

My Posts Started Looking Like Everyone Else’s

DB Dave — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:37:17 +0000

I’ve never claimed to be a good writer, but I’ve always enjoyed writing, so it actually pissed me off recently when I noticed how my last few blog posts were turning into AI slop. It sounds weird even to me now to say that I “noticed” it – as if it was super difficult to ... Read more

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Throwing away my fancy AI memory system

DB Dave — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 06:36:22 +0000

About 18 months ago I started refining and customising how I worked with AI (Claude in my case), as I’ve written about before. While I was writing that series of posts, I was also working on what I thought was going to be an amazing, super-fancy enhancement to my very basic filesystem/markdown file based system. ... Read more

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I Built Another Thing! (To extract Slack conversations for my “AI memory”)

DB Dave — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 07:10:23 +0000

I’ve written about my AI memory system before, which gives Claude a “deeper” memory across conversations. I rely on this every day, but noticed that it still misses some context due to the fact that so many day-to-day conversations happen in Slack. Stuff like design discussions, technical opinions, those crucial “oh by the way” messages ... Read more

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I Built a Thing! (To Transcribe my Meetings)

DB Dave — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 03:43:38 +0000

The third-party transcription app I was using for my AI memory system got flagged as non-compliant at work. Zoom’s built-in transcription only really works when you’re the host. For vendor calls, external meetings, and anything where I wasn’t running the show, I needed an alternative that was free, local, and (more) compliant. So I built ... Read more

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My AI Memory System: The Complete Implementation

DB Dave — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 05:59:20 +0000

Right… enough context, let’s cut the shit and get to the good stuff. Here’s my complete AI memory system – the one I use every day to manage engineering teams. In the previous posts (1, 2), I showed you the background and high-level setup. Now let’s look at what I’ve built on top of that ... Read more

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Building Your AI’s Memory: The Surprisingly Simple Foundation

DB Dave — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:34:51 +0000

Last time I talked about giving your AI assistant an actual memory. Today I’ll show you how to set it up, and here’s the best bit: you barely have to write anything yourself. I didn’t want a new note-taking tool, I wanted someone else to take notes for me. The whole system runs on markdown ... Read more

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Why Your AI Assistant Forgets Everything (And Why Mine Doesn’t)

DB Dave — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 08:05:21 +0000

If you’re a developer, you’re drowning in AI productivity content. Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot; there’s a new YouTube tutorial every hour promising to 10x your coding output. But if you’re a people leader or knowledge worker? You get… prompt templates. Maybe a ChatGPT course on “effective communication”. Endless LinkedIn drivel (from someone trying to sell ... Read more

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Change(s) of scenery

DB Dave — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:12:48 +0000

Quick update Since my last post, I moved on from Timely to join Sharesies, and then moved again to join GitLab as an Engineering Manager. Sharesies was a great place to work overall, but I had the opportunity to join GitLab as an Engineering Manager in their Reliability department, and there were signs that things ... Read more

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Interesting times

DB Dave — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 20:45:43 +0000

Well, we are certainly living in interesting times. The world seems to have gone to hell in a hand-basket over the last few weeks, doesn’t it? As the world is struggling to cope with finding a “new normal” amidst COVID-19 chaos, I thought I’d jot down a few rambling thoughts from my neck of the ... Read more

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Cloud Engineers – I want you!

DB Dave — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:58:27 +0000

I’ve been wanting to resurrect this blog for a while, so what better way to do so than advertising the fact that I need some help at work? 🙂 Here at Timely I head up the Platform team. We’re currently a team of 5 (including myself) covering areas such as internal support, reporting, data and ... Read more

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