Vibing Crafting with discipline and agentic AI
Northerly is a full-stack engineering shop crafting out of Leeds, UK. The discipline came before AI — with tests, types, and small maintainable changes — and the AI fits on top of that, integrating agents in the delivery loop.
The craft and where AI fits
Designing AI into the product
It should earn its spot, but know where it doesn’t belong. Things like model choice, prompt and eval design, and having a working prototype ready early enough to rethink your approach.
Shipping to production
This includes retrieval, tool use, guardrails, observability, and the eval suite that keeps everything honest. It’s the less glamorous part that decides if it can handle real users.
AI in the delivery loop
Agents exist within the codebase, during review, and throughout delivery. This is why a team this size operates like a bigger one, and why one of us is essentially an agent.
Principles
Evals come before vibes
AI has made it easy to quickly build the wrong thing. We write the eval first, so when someone says "it seems better," there’s actually a number to check.
Ship small
If nobody can review a change, then nobody can trust it. Changes should be small, continuous, and reversible — every single time.
Type the seams
Most production bugs happen at boundaries. If you make sure the boundary is clear, then many of those bugs simply disappear.
Fast is accessible
Performance and accessibility are really the same discipline, just wearing different hats: it’s about respecting the person on the other end of the connection.