James Wilson

James Wilson

Product engineer
#101089993 followers9 following
#1,655Last month
21 KP
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About

I recruit product engineers for early-stage startups, seed to Series D. Mostly software, increasingly AI. I got into recruitment at Robert Walters in Melbourne after years in and around sport, moved to London, and that's where I found startups and the kind of engineers I actually wanted to work with. Been focused on them ever since. These days I do it at Ethiq, a small tech-focused agency. The engineers I place are product-minded: full-stack, AI/ML and data people who want to own a problem end to end and ship, not just clear tickets. If that's you, or you're a founder trying to hire a few of them, say hello. I also co-host What Next?, a podcast about engineering careers, and rowed for Australia at national level in a previous life.

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1mo ago

What's something AI coding assistants are surprisingly *bad* at?

I spent yesterday debugging a payment flow that an AI assistant confidently generated for me. The happy path? Flawless. The part where a user's card declines mid-transaction and we need to retry with exponential backoff while logging to three different services? The assistant completely missed it and didn't even flag that it was skipping anything.

It got me thinking about where these tools actually excel versus where they consistently fall short. They're genuinely exceptional at scaffolding, at spinning up the obvious structure of a feature. But the moment you need to handle what shouldn't happen race conditions, partial failures, the weird state your system ends up in at 2 AM they seem to lose the plot entirely.

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