What Vibe Coding Won't Tell You About Building a Data Platform
What Vibe Coding Won't Tell You About Building a Data Platform
tech leadershipvibe-codingai
Head of Engineering · Technical Advisor · Expert Wife Annoyer
Twenty-plus years of turning complex technical problems into things that work.
I'm Joe Southin — Head of Engineering at Great Yellow, where I'm building a data platform to make regenerative land use investible and scaleable. I also advise teams on architecture, data, and AI, and I write about the things I find interesting.
Recent opinions
All opinions →Building a shared language for landscape recovery
We’re open-sourcing an ontology for nature finance & landscape recovery.
ontologylandscape recoveryai
Call for a Consortium Blockchain Registry for Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) Units
Learning the basics of blockchain in a day, and developing a working proof-of-concept and potential application to the trading of voluntary biodiversity units in the UK.
bngblockchainlandscape recovery
Selected work
All work →Research
Good Enough? Quantised LLMs on a Laptop
A controlled study of five open-weights 7–9B models, quantised to run on a MacBook, against a Claude Opus 4.6 baseline. 1,500+ scored responses, two independent judges, four task categories. The frontier-vs-local gap turns out to be task-dependent rather than uniform — and Qwen 2.5 7B displaces Llama as the Pareto-optimal local choice.
Case StudySpec-Driven Development: IsoHome
A weekend experiment in spec-driven development — starting from a dictated brief and structured specs, Claude Code produced IsoHome: an isochrone mapping tool that combines real train timetables, drive-time polygons, and weighted desirability layers to find ideal places to live within a given commute of London.
ResearchOverview of Academic Research Papers (Materials Science)
What started as a lucky summer internship measuring piezoelectric films at Cranfield University evolved into a full research career — from clean rooms and supercomputers to published papers in the Journal of Physics and IEEE, a US patent, and even a serendipitous reunion with the BBC scientist I'd written to as a child. None of it would have happened without the generosity of mentors like Roger Whatmore, Steve Wilson, and many others who showed me the ropes.
I also build experiments, make tools, and paint watercolours.
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