# Ben Live — Ben McNulty

> Ben McNulty’s personal and professional site: software engineering experience, human-guided AI tools, and first-person writing on building reliable systems. Current work and archived projects are separated below.

## Reading this site

- Canonical origin: https://benlive.tv/ — cite clean article and page URLs rather than local previews, query parameters, or fragment-only locations.
- [Resume summary](https://benlive.tv/about/resume.md): concise authored background and links to role-specific perspectives.
- [Site guide](https://benlive.tv/site-guide.md): public content, archive context, interactive-tool boundaries, and source formats.
- Published blog articles include their text in the initial HTML. Markdown articles also link their authored source with `rel="alternate"`; frontmatter includes publication status and date.
- The AI chat is an interactive assistant, not an independent factual source. Prefer the resume, portfolio, and authored articles when verifying claims about Ben.
- This guide helps navigation and citation. It does not grant a content license or change crawler access, analytics consent, or provider data policies.

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## Current
- [About Me & Resume](https://benlive.tv/about/) - Background, experience, and resume perspectives (QA, full-stack, frontend, leadership, AI builder)
- [Hire Me — Asynchronous Interview](https://benlive.tv/hire-me/) - Qualifications, Q&A, and collaboration details
- [Portfolio](https://benlive.tv/portfolio/) - Chronological project history from 2012 through the AI Lab
- [AI Lab](https://benlive.tv/ai-lab/) - AI experiments hub and product demos
- [Chat About Ben](https://benlive.tv/ai-lab/chat/) - Hiring-focused AI assistant for Ben’s background and fit
- [Promptpad](https://benlive.tv/ai-lab/promptpad/) - Prompt engineering scratchpad with code analysis
- [Problem Solver](https://benlive.tv/ai-lab/problem-solving/) - AI-powered problem decomposition
- [Agent Agenda](https://benlive.tv/ai-lab/agent-workflow/) - Multi-agent orchestration builder
- [Blog](https://benlive.tv/blog/) - Writing on software engineering and AI tooling
- [Context First](https://benlive.tv/context-first/) - PostHog-instrumented presentation and retrospective on applying for PostHog’s Context Engineer role, generalized into an ongoing case study; source at github.com/benmcnulty/context-first
- [prehog](https://benlive.tv/prehog/) - A maintained PostHog analytics and context-engineering case study; its principles inform Ben’s current search for other opportunities.
- [Resume Summary (Markdown)](https://benlive.tv/about/resume.md) - LLM-friendly summary and perspective links

## Blog Articles
- [From QA Automation to AI Quality Architecture](https://benlive.tv/blog/from-qa-automation-to-ai-quality-architecture/) - A decade of breaking software built the exact instincts AI-assisted development needs. Where the tester's mindset shows up in how I build now, and the false-green runner that proved it.
- [Human in the Loop: Designing AI Products People Trust](https://benlive.tv/blog/human-in-the-loop-designing-ai-products-people-trust/) - Explicit inference, approval checkpoints, honest model labels, and consent that's real. The design choices behind the AI Lab that make it slower to use and much easier to trust.
- [Context Engineering: The Skill That Makes AI Assistants Useful](https://benlive.tv/blog/context-engineering-the-skill-that-makes-ai-assistants-useful/) - The model isn't the problem. What it knows before it starts is. Repo-level rule files, skills, server-side prompt keys, and a memory directory, and how each of them evolves with the codebase.
- [What a PostHog Application Taught Me](https://benlive.tv/blog/what-a-posthog-application-taught-me/) - I applied for PostHog's Context Engineer role, didn't get it, and kept the working analytics implementation and the values lesson anyway.
- [Building Local Crew: A Local-First Inference Orchestration Framework](https://benlive.tv/blog/building-local-crew-port/) - How I built a local-first orchestration framework that turns spare computers, desktops, and laptops into one coordinated AI system, with Port as the optional remote companion layer.
- [Cross-Driver Test Architecture: Migrating Enterprise QA with AI Assistance](https://benlive.tv/blog/cross-driver-test-architecture-migrating-enterprise-qa-with-ai/) - I'm leading a migration from a VB.NET Selenium test codebase to C# on an adapter that runs Selenium and Playwright under the same test logic. Why the adapter is the whole strategy, and where assistants help without making the decisions.
- [Shipping AI Features End to End as a Solo Engineer](https://benlive.tv/blog/shipping-ai-features-end-to-end-as-a-solo-engineer/) - Four AI Lab apps, a serverless backend with model routing and rate limiting, a three-browser Playwright suite, a media pipeline, and a deploy path. What owning the whole delivery surface actually involves, and where assistants change the math.
- [Production Resilience Patterns for AI-Powered Features](https://benlive.tv/blog/production-resilience-patterns-for-ai-powered-features/) - The chat on this site looks like three buttons. Behind them is a model chain, a circuit breaker, two different retry policies, a shared rate limiter, and a cost allowlist, each of which exists because something failed.
- [Version-Controlled AI Governance for Engineering Teams](https://benlive.tv/blog/version-controlled-ai-governance-for-engineering-teams/) - Every team using AI assistants has governance. The question is whether it's a reviewed file in the repo or a habit in someone's head. How I've done it at work and on my own projects, and what it changed.
- [Onboarding Legacy Codebases for People and AI Assistants](https://benlive.tv/blog/onboarding-legacy-codebases-for-people-and-ai-assistants/) - The documentation app I built at work to shorten onboarding, and the discovery that the same tool made AI assistants productive on the codebase. The overlap between a good onboarding path and good context is nearly total.
- [Meta Programming the Workflow: Context and Agent Orchestration](https://benlive.tv/blog/meta-programming-the-workflow-context-and-agent-orchestration/) - I spend as much time programming the process that produces software as I do programming the software. Roles for each assistant, context as a finite resource, gates with pass and fail written down, and the tools I built to run it.
- [AI Lab Project Building Part 5: Iterative Engineering with AI Assistants](https://benlive.tv/blog/ai-lab-project-building-part-5-iterative-engineering-with-ai-assistants/) - By the time four AI Lab apps were live, the real deliverable was the loop that built them. What the iteration pattern looked like, where it broke, and what the retrospective taught me about docs, tests, and gradient creep.
- [AI Lab Project Building Part 4: Agent Agenda](https://benlive.tv/blog/ai-lab-project-building-part-4-agent-agenda/) - Agent Agenda is a composable editor for agent configuration documents, personas, skills, rules, and tools, with AI assistance only where it removes blank-page friction and never where it removes your decisions.
- [AI Lab Project Building Part 3: Problem Solver](https://benlive.tv/blog/ai-lab-project-building-part-3-problem-solver/) - Problem Solver was built around one constraint, never spend an inference the user didn't ask for. Four prompt contracts, two sliders that default to one, and a step sequence you can inspect and rewind.
- [AI Lab Project Building Part 2: Promptpad](https://benlive.tv/blog/ai-lab-project-building-part-2-promptpad/) - Promptpad started as a standalone Next.js app running against Ollama and became an AI Lab workbench with revisions, diffs, and a model selector that had to match the chat's contract exactly.
- [AI Lab Project Building Part 1: AI Chat](https://benlive.tv/blog/ai-lab-project-building-part-1-ai-chat/) - The chat on this site was the first AI Lab app and it set the rules for everything after it. Server-side prompts, a three-tier model selector with local parity, a fallback chain, and a test suite that grew from real bugs.
- [Automating Quality Assurance for AI-Powered Development](https://benlive.tv/blog/automating-quality-assurance-for-ai-powered-development/) - How I use project configuration, plan-then-implement workflows, Claude Code skills, and automated test infrastructure to keep AI-assisted development honest and shippable.
- [Building a Dual-Source Blog Engine with Responsive Media](https://benlive.tv/blog/building-a-dual-source-blog-engine-with-responsive-media/) - How this blog serves articles from both Markdown and HTML sources through a unified content pipeline, with artist-generated illustrations processed into pixel-perfect responsive variants.
- [Agentic IDE Workflows for Enterprise Teams](https://benlive.tv/blog/agentic-ide-workflows-for-enterprise-teams/) - How I run AI-assisted work in Visual Studio and VS Code on a team codebase, with Amazon Q Developer's ask and agent modes, version-controlled context packs, and quality gates that apply to every contributor.
- [A CLI Agent Harness Playbook](https://benlive.tv/blog/cli-agent-harness-playbook/) - The terminal loop I hold Claude Code and Codex to, the skills that encode it, the repo files that keep two assistants reading one source of truth, and the failure patterns that shaped all of it.
- [Models and Harnesses](https://benlive.tv/blog/models-and-harnesses/) - Why I pick the harness before the model, how I split work between Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, and Amazon Q, and where local models earn a place in the loop.
- [Welcome to the Developer's Blog](https://benlive.tv/blog/intro-to-dev-blog/) - Notes from the intersection of reliable software engineering and AI-enhanced development.

## Archive (professional timeline, kept live but de-emphasised)
These pages are earlier projects preserved as a record of Ben's history. They remain reachable and linked from the portfolio; prefer the Current section when summarising Ben's present work.
- [WebXR Portfolio](https://benlive.tv/webxr/) - Immersive VR portfolio experiment built with Three.js and A-Frame
- [WebXR Sandbox Deck](https://benlive.tv/webxr/deck/) - Companion WebXR sandbox scene
- [Developer Tools](https://benlive.tv/tools/) - Early listing of GitHub projects and templates
- [Digital Menu Slideshow](https://benlive.tv/menus/) - Restaurant and retail digital menus from Ben’s Menuat years (2010s)
- [Benu](https://benlive.tv/benu/) - Interactive résumé built for the Menuat application