About James
Twenty-five years in enterprise IT taught me one thing: the moment you stop learning, the industry leaves you behind.
I spent most of that time deep in VMware infrastructure—building, automating, and occasionally breaking production environments at 3 AM. PowerCLI became my second language. I got comfortable being the person who solved problems others hadn’t seen before.
Then AI happened. Not the hype cycle—the actual shift.
I watched tools emerge that could write code, explain architectures, and think through problems alongside me. My choice was simple: observe from the sidelines or dive in and figure out how this changes everything I know about building software.
I chose to dive in.
My AI education hasn’t come from a bootcamp or a certificate program. It’s come from building things, real projects inspired by real issues, and I decided to do so with AI as a collaborator. Hundreds of hours ‘pair-programming’ with Claude. Learning prompt engineering by doing it wrong, then doing it better. Designing systems like
Cortex, an event-sourced memory architecture for AI coding assistants, because the tools I needed didn’t exist yet.
https://astgl.com/p/cortex-event-sourced-memory-ai-coding-assistants
That’s what you’ll find here: a systems engineer learning AI engineering in public. The wins. The mistakes. The “aha” moments that might save you hours.
What I Write About
AI-assisted development—practical workflows, not hype
PowerCLI and VMware automation—still relevant, still powerful
Building in public—real projects with real constraints
Technical deep dives—the “why” behind the “how”
The Philosophy
“Much to learn, there always is.”
I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I still learn something new every week. Teaching reinforces learning—that’s the whole point of this publication. If I figure something out, I write it down. If I build something useful, I share how.
Always a student. Often times a teacher.
Find Me Elsewhere
GitHub: https://github.com/Jmeg8r (personal) and https://github.com/As-The-Geek-Learns (business)—where the code lives
Archive: [astgl.com/archive—everything I’ve published
Podcast (Available on Apple, Spotify, and PocketCasts)
— James Cruce
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