Public projects
I am a software architect and principal engineer in Brisbane, Australia, working on distributed systems, data platforms, and the delivery systems that make AI coding agents dependable in real codebases. Background and selected work live at jamesbaxter.com; consulting engagements at baxter.consulting.
/ Projects
Documentation rots because nothing holds it accountable. Headwater turns a documentation corpus into a contract a machine can check. Documents declare what they are and which code they govern, an engine checks them on every commit, and the graph shows AI coding agents exactly which documents apply to the file they're editing — by lookup, not by search. Headwater governs its own corpus, and its efficacy claims are measured and reported, not assumed.
Vendor curated slices of files across many repositories. The files stay in your tree and are owned like the rest of your code, held faithful to upstream by a checksum manifest, and upgraded through governed, review-gated pull requests. Built for the case where identical files have to exist in dozens of places: agent instructions, CI templates, linter configs, design tokens.
/ Elsewhere
Background, selected work, and how I approach a problem.
Consulting — AI delivery systems, platform architecture and modernisation, production investigation.
Everything public, including older experiments kept as they were.