01 / Hello

The model is rarely the hard part.

Hi, I'm Nick. I lead technology delivery for banks. At work I'm the one pushing everyone to try AI on their real jobs, and also the one explaining why a chatbot isn't the answer to everything.

Engraved-style illustration of Nick on a blue poster, labelled Nick Solly, AI agents and leadership, and Ideas, People, Systems, Progress.

NS-001 / Day job: Senior Manager, Capital Markets Technology, EY
Before: Royal Bank of Scotland. Before that, a captain in the Irish Guards.
Builds: Agents, mostly. Then the agents build the rest.
Asks: "Could an agent do this?" Then, "Would a rule do?"

02 / Who

I started building for the web as a teenager in the late 1990s. Dreamweaver first, then Flash and ActionScript, then back ends from scratch and every kind of CMS going.

Then came the Army, a bank, and consulting to banks, where the job is getting complicated change to land somewhere that can't afford to get it wrong.

Now agents write most of my code. Teenage me would have loved that.

Fig. 02 / Changelog

Built with Dreamweaver, then PowerPoint, and now agents.

03 / Beliefs

Things I believe

About AI, about leading people, and the places where the two overlap.

B-01

Rules before reasoning.

If something can be written as a rule, write the rule. I keep seeing LLMs given jobs that a few lines of logic would do more cheaply and get right every time. Save the model for the parts that need judgement.

B-02

A longer prompt isn't a harness.

When an AI tool gets something wrong, the reflex is to add another paragraph to the prompt. What it usually needs is structure around it: checks before and after, a clear hand-off, and a person signing off anything that matters.

B-03

Tell people why. Let them work out how.

Mission command, which I took from the Army: give people the intent and the limits, then get out of the way. Most managers give too much how and not enough why. It works on agents too.

B-04

Agents can write the code. I still own what ships.

A lot of the code on my GitHub was written by agents I run, and the commit history says so. I set the spec, approve each phase and read what comes back. If it breaks, it's my name on it.

B-05

Calm on top. Paddling underneath.

People who've worked with me tend to describe me as calm. That's the top half of the swan. The Army taught me that a room copies the mood of whoever's in charge, so the paddling stays out of sight.

04 / Built

Things I've built

Most of this code was written by agents I run, and the commit history says so. That's deliberate. The system is the thing I built.

The Foundry

Featured build

An overnight software factory. A cheap model reads developer complaints on Hacker News and Reddit, a stronger one picks a problem and writes the spec, and a coding agent builds an MVP and pushes it before I'm up. I commissioned it, approved each phase and reviewed what it shipped.

01 Scout
Claude Haiku
Reads the complaints
02 Spec
Claude Sonnet
Picks one, writes acceptance criteria
03 Build
aider + Sonnet
Writes the MVP
04 Ship
git push
Before breakfast

$0.47
First end-to-end build
19
Repos built, Feb to Apr 2026
8
Of them public

Orchestration

Agent swarm ↗

Spins up coding agents in their own git worktrees, one branch and one terminal each. Failures get retried, CI has to pass before a PR is ready, and anything running for an hour without a PR gets flagged.

Map

Jeeves ↗

An interactive map of the agent estate behind all this: a hub agent, standing specialists, on-demand workers and the Foundry.

Prototype

Controls clustering ↗

Groundwork for grouping financial controls by what they do rather than who wrote them: it pulls different firms' control libraries into one schema and starts stripping out their fingerprints. A 2025 prototype; the clustering itself isn't built yet. The closest thing here to my day job.

Day job, approved

The work one

An agent system for the admin layer of a consulting engagement. It turns meeting transcripts into actions and drafts reports, plans before it acts, waits for my approval, and cleans anything before it leaves the firm.

A yellow Labrador in a sunny garden, looking straight at the camera — Fig. 07 / Head of walks

05 / Off the clock

Off the clock

Three kids, one Labrador, and a lot of walks.
Painting Warhammer miniatures. You'd think the Army would have cured me of moving small armies about. It didn't.

06 / Now

Updated September 2026

Now

Setting up Hermes agents to take on the home admin.
Working out my own operating model with AI in it, for work and for home.
Iterating this site until it feels more like me than a CV.

07 / Say hello

Say hello.

If you want to talk about AI in banks, agent systems or leading teams, email me.

nick@nicksolly.co.uk

The model is rarely the hard part.The modelis rarelythe hard part.