Research on the part that doesn't compress.

How can vibe-coding be designed as a creative medium that gives non-technical creatives genuine agency, appropriate trust, and reflective understanding?

Practice-based means the building is the method. Rather than studying vibe-coding from the outside, I build real systems for real partners, instrument the process, and treat the failures as data. The artefacts aren't illustrations of ideas I already had; they're where the ideas come from.

When this PhD started there was no published empirical study of non-technical creatives using agentic coding tools. Developers, students, children, scientists: covered. The people the democratisation claims are actually about: not covered. That's the gap between the marketing and the literature, and it's the gap this research fills.

Eleven chapters in four parts, submission targeted for 2028. Foundations sets the theoretical ground: distributed cognition, situated action, and boundary objects, applied to a medium where the plan emerges through conversation. Empirical investigations covers the case studies, the discourse corpus, and both participant studies. Design intervention turns the findings into things: the MVL framework and tools that scaffold reflection rather than replace it. Synthesis holds the pair of outcomes the whole project balances, genuine empowerment and the deskilling Shannon Vallor warns about, and asks what the tools transform the needed knowledge into.

About 33,000 words of it exist in draft so far. The PhD series on the blog is the public version of the same arc, written as it happens: start with why I started a PhD about talking to AI.

The framework gets tested in rooms, not just papers. I run four formats: a 30-minute live build for conferences and seminars, a two-hour first-experience workshop, a half-day intensive with deliberate breaking-and-fixing, and a multi-session course that ends with an independence test. The pedagogy in one line: confidence before competence, scaffold rather than prosthesise, creative projects rather than exercises, and honesty about where the tools fail.

Workshops are bookable; details on the workshops page.

Study 1 is recruiting now. If you're a creative practitioner who makes things but doesn't write code, and you're curious what happens when you build software by talking, one session and a conversation is all it takes. Get in touch and mention the study.