Gareth Austen AI systems · product engineering

Notes from the workbench

I build AI systems that have to work in the real world.

I’m Gareth Austen, a software and machine-learning engineer in Dublin. This is where I write about optimising Agents, developing robust quality gates, designing good evals, building Tell Me Ted, working with coding agents, and turning prototypes into dependable products.

Latest writing

All writing

  1. What’s Inside an AI Teddy Bear?

    A high-level tour of the hardware behind Tell Me Ted: the ESP32-S3, camera, microphones, speaker, offline voice chip, storage and power system.

    Building Tell Me Ted· Voice AI· Embedded Systems

  2. Codex Can Write the Code. You Still Own the System.

    Codex accelerated a major refactor, but an essential OTA capability needed repair. Here is how we changed our prompts, tests and review process.

    Building Tell Me Ted· Codex· Embedded Systems

  3. Building a Startup With ChatGPT as a Daily Collaborator

    A practical account of how a small team uses ChatGPT across product thinking, software, hardware, operations and decision-making and where it still fails.

    Building Tell Me Ted· Artificial Intelligence· Codex

Series in progress

Building Tell Me Ted

Twelve field notes on building a physical AI product: the architecture, the hardware, the judgement calls and the mistakes.

  1. 01 We’re Building a Teddy Bear That Can Read With a Child
  2. 02 Building a Startup With ChatGPT as a Daily Collaborator
  3. 03 Codex Can Write the Code. You Still Own the System.
  4. 04 What’s Inside an AI Teddy Bear?
  5. 05 From Chained AI Calls to a Realtime Voice Experience
View the complete series