Codú is growing up

After years as Ireland's largest coding community, here is where it's headed, and why this one is personal for me.

I started Codú because I wanted a place where people learning to code in Ireland wouldn't feel alone. That was the whole idea. I had been the person staring at an error message at midnight with nobody to ask, and I didn't want anyone else sitting in that quiet for as long as I did. Over the years it grew into the biggest coding community in the country, around 10,000 developers through our different channels, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a side project and became one of the things I care most about.

So I want to be honest with you. For a while now, Codú has felt a step behind where the rest of my life has been pointing. And when something you love starts to drift, you owe it the truth.

Here is what I mean. By day I lead innovation at Marsh, a Fortune 500 company, and most of that work has turned into AI. We built an internal platform called LenAI that now serves around 90,000 colleagues and handles more than two million requests a month. It reached 89% adoption without anyone being told they had to use it, and in its first year it saved over a million hours. We have shipped close to 40 production systems on top of it. Those numbers matter here for one reason. They taught me something I didn't expect, and it changed how I think about Codú.

The lesson was this. AI isn't the strategy. Redesigning the work is. Most companies were bolting a chatbot onto a process that was already broken and calling it progress, and we were headed the same way until we stopped and asked a better question. What would this whole job look like if we built it from scratch today? The teams that asked that built things people wanted to use. The teams that skipped it built demos that sat in a corner gathering dust.

That question followed me home. On weekends I still write code and ship my own things. One of them is Assemble, software for estimating construction jobs, and there isn't a line of AI in it. It works because I started with the people doing the work and what they needed, instead of starting with a tool I happened to be excited about. That is the part I have always cared about most, the why behind the work rather than the tools. Who is this for, and what problem does it solve?

Somewhere along the way I noticed the people in Codú were asking the same question I was. They had learned to code. Now they wanted to build things that mattered, and they were trying to work out what AI meant for them and whether the thing they were making was any good. Codú was still set up to teach web development to beginners, which is a fine thing to do, but it wasn't the conversation my members were trying to have anymore.

I think this is why the change matters to me beyond the strategy of it. Codú is the project that keeps me in love with building. When I'm worn down by meetings and roadmaps, it's the place I go to remember why I started writing software in the first place. A thing like that has to keep growing, or it slowly turns into a museum of who you used to be. I had no interest in keeping a museum. So Codú had to grow up, alongside the people who have grown up inside it.

Here is where it's going. Codú is becoming a home for builders and product engineers. By product engineer I mean something particular. It's the person who writes the code, talks to the people who'll use it, and holds an opinion about what's worth building in the first place. Most good software comes from people who work that way, and AI has handed that kind of person the biggest lever they've ever had.

You'll see more about building real things and the craft of doing it well. You'll see how the best builders are using AI to get from a rough idea to something that holds up in front of real users, and more honest talk about what's worth making at all. AI will be the loudest thing in the room, because it's in everyone's work right now and it's moving fast. But it was never going to be the whole point. Assemble has no AI in it and it belongs here as much as anything, because the same thread runs through all of it. Would your people pay for this? If the answer is no, you didn't build a product. You built a demo. We're going to help each other build fewer demos.

The newsletter is part of this, and it's getting a new name and a sharper focus. Going forward, it's called The Build, by Codú. Each issue will be about what's worth building and how to ship it, with the AI tools and techniques that earn their place and the product thinking underneath them. Now and then I'll take apart a workflow that's worth rebuilding from scratch and show you the working. I read widely so you don't have to, and I'll bring back what's useful from both of the worlds I live in, the enterprise one and the weekend one. If you've been a reader, thank you for staying. If you're new, this is a good week to start.

I won't pretend I have all of this mapped out. I'd rather tell you that than dress it up. What I do know is that Codú has always been a personal thing for me, built for people I like and want to see do well, and that part isn't changing.

The room is getting bigger, and the conversation is catching up to where the work has gone. I hope you'll build with us.