Robert Peake

“AI First” is a Tragicomic Mistake

Robert Peake — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:47:43 +0000

The corporate spin on AI is making me sick. Look, I’m not saying this as a luddite or technophobe. I started my career at Berkeley in the ’90s, teaching programming languages to fellow students who had then-crazy dreams, like facial recognition and self-driving cars. As a poet and computational linguist, the first dream I realised was a language model that could generate haiku. I’ve been a…

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Wind in the Willows Digital Set Show Reel

Robert Peake — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:51:37 +0000

The Whitwell Players production of Wind in the Willows on 19-21 September, 2025 was held in All Saints’ Church, St. Paul’s Walden Bury. The venue presented many challenges to the technical crew, including setting up lighting, sound, and stage equipment in a Norman stone building. Another challenge was to recreate the pastoral setting within a religious edifice. With a screen behind the rood…

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The Infinite Game of Poetry: Protocols for Living, Listening, and Transcending the Rules

Robert Peake — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:00:02 +0000

Taking up the idea of protocols as engineered arguments, this talk explores the timeless algorithms that give poetry its power to evolve—from an ancient mnemonic device to a transformational way of being. Drawing on both theory and practice, in this one-hour exploration we will look at various examples of poetry’s rule-making and rule-breaking, and even dabble in a bit of writing as well.

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The Reason AI Amazes Us … Is Us

Robert Peake — Fri, 16 May 2025 14:56:52 +0000

In order to understand our current relationship to AI and where it might be headed, we must try to wrap our heads around some very big numbers. In doing so, though, we have a lot to learn about ourselves and our technology in simple, human terms. More than 100 billion people have walked the Earth, each with a brain composed of over 100 trillion neural connections. This means the number of…

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What AI Taught Me About Being Human

Robert Peake — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:57:50 +0000

I still remember the mixed feelings I had reading my first computer-generated haiku. It wasn’t Bashō, but it spoke to me somehow. This felt like a triumph, because I had written the software that wrote the poem, but also a bit confrontational, because I was a budding poet, and it was just a machine. The year was 1996, and I was an undergraduate, writing code in a cutting-edge language for AI…

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What Colour is Your Startup?

Robert Peake — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:33:01 +0000

It’s a project manager’s trick as old as time to tell the boss that they can have the new product fast, cheap, good — but that they can only pick two of the three. A version of this concept can also provide strategic direction for the culture of startup companies, where the whole “project” of the company itself is to respond to the market appropriately in terms of cost, features…

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Stop Sheltering Geeks

Robert Peake — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

I was called all the names before they were cool: nerd, weirdo, geek. Once Gates, Wozniak, Brin, Page, and Zuckerberg showed the world that smart oddballs could build empires, the terms, and those who wore them, became coveted in the software industry. The opening sentence of the introduction to Paul Glen’s book Leading Geeks (2003) sums up the love-hate thinking of non-geek leaders at the…

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Why Do We Only Measure Team Health When It’s Too Late?

Robert Peake — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

I have come to love what many dread: exit interviews. People who have decided to leave have nothing to lose, so if you ask the right questions, you can find out why your team culture is broken really fast. Losing good people is awful, of course, psychologically and for the bottom line. Forbes estimates that turnover costs the company 33% of an employee’s annual salary. After three turnovers…

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Introduction to My New Book, Engineering Team Effectiveness

Robert Peake — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:00:00 +0000

I am currently writing a book with the working title Engineering Team Effectiveness: A Field Guide to Fostering Powerful Technical Teams. Here is a draft of the introduction: I have spent the past twenty years answering the question: “Why do highly intelligent, skilled, motivated engineering teams come together and fail?” There are often logistical factors as to why they eventually…

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The Engineering Hierarchy of Needs

Robert Peake — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 14:00:00 +0000

Most engineering managers try to balance the needs of their engineering team with the needs of the business. This either/or is stressful and unnecessary. It stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about what truly high-performing engineers really want and need, which is a human conditions as old as the pyramids. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a useful model for understanding how certain…

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Agile is Wonderful; Agile is Awful (Here’s Why)

Robert Peake — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 10:39:02 +0000

Zealots are born when work starts working. Through sheer force of charisma, and with every good intention, they make enough noise to attract attention. In the case of Agile, what began with engineers soon grew to catch the ear of global consulting firms. The job of these firms is to listen closely to the problems companies are having, and then use what they have heard to convince them to buy…

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The Hidden Cost of Cyborg Working

Robert Peake — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 11:41:01 +0000

AI is set to teach us more about how our own brains work—but not in the way you might think. Generative AI is already automating some of our intellectual activities at work. Many of the benefits and drawbacks are obvious, but amidst all the talk of neural networks, a key component seems to be missing from the conversation: our own dear minds. The benefits of automation are usually stated…

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