Software Development insights, articles and news

Most senior leadership teams have now seen AI do something impressive in a demo or a pilot. The harder question is how to turn it into a useful, dependable way of working.

The gap between a working tool and a trustworthy one was the focus of our webinar, From Vibe-Coded to Production-Ready.

We brought Manchester's senior leaders together for our first AI roundtable and asked them to be honest about where they actually are with AI adoption. What came back wasn't flattering, but it was useful.

A short, independent research piece explaining why The Curve is running The State of AI in UK Business 2026 survey, and why mid-market UK businesses are underrepresented in existing AI adoption research.

Is SaaS dead? Not quite. But something has genuinely changed. Vibe coding has made it cheaper and faster to build software than to buy it — and some SaaS subscriptions are already starting to look like an unnecessary cost. But the decline narrative misses something important. The hard part of SaaS was never the features. It was everything wrapped around them: security, compliance, uptime and accountability. Vibe coding hasn't changed any of that. This article sets out what organisations should actually do about it — and why the smartest move isn't replacing everything, but knowing which tools are safe to build, which aren't, and what needs to be in place to make ownership work long term.

Someone in your team has probably already built something with AI. It works. That's exactly why it's worth a closer look. Most SMEs don't have a development team or a CTO — but that hasn't stopped people from building. This article sets out a practical five-step framework for understanding what's already been built, where the risk sits, and when to bring in external expertise to close the gaps.

Vibe coding makes software faster to build. It also skips every checkpoint that normally exists between an idea and a deployed system. This article argues that the risk is not in the tool itself, but in the absence of process around it, and that most organisations using it have not yet mapped where that gap actually sits.

In conversations about software reliability, availability targets are often expressed with reassuring simplicity: “We’re aiming for five nines.” Yet behind that short phrase lies one of the most complex, expensive, and nuanced challenges in software engineering.

In many boardrooms, conversations about regulatory compliance and software sound deceptively simple: “We need to comply with GDPR.”, “Our system must support ISO 27001.”, “We have to meet FCA reporting requirements.”.

Building software isn’t just about writing code, it’s about delivering something that works reliably, scales effectively, and provides a great experience for users. Too often, testing is treated as a final checkbox before launch.