About Allen Firth

With over two decades in tech, I have led development teams and built software for large enterprises and startups alike. My focus is architecting and shipping complex distributed systems to a high standard.

I spent six and a half years in London, working with leading organisations in law, insurance, and finance.

I now run CodeStream, my software development consultancy, based in Durban, South Africa.

Since June 2025 I’ve used AI coding agents as a default part of how I build: planning and prompts I control, generation I treat as a draft, and nothing merges without my review. The goal isn’t “AI wrote it” — it’s higher throughput with the same bar on design, tests, and production safety.

The core of how I work is simplicity, testing, and automation — now applied to how AI is used, not only to the code it produces.

Agents draft. I decide. Production stays human-owned.