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. 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

  2. Building a Teddy Bear That Can Read With a Child

    Tell Me Ted is a teddy bear designed to read alongside a child. Here is why we started building it, how the prototype works, and what we are learning.

    Building Tell Me Ted· Artificial Intelligence· Voice AI

  3. Agent Orchestration Frameworks

    Discover top open-source frameworks for orchestrating AI agents and explore their unique strengths and applications in automating complex tasks.

    AI· AI Agents

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