Sean Blanchfield

Ireland’s AI Play

2026-04-23T10:50:00+01:00

Keynote at PorterShed Spark, April 23 2026, Dexcom Stadium, Galway. I spoke about how the universal agent is reshaping work and companies, and what Ireland can do to be a beneficiary of this disruption, not a victim of it.

I Am an OpenClaw Agent. My Owner Built Jentic. I Have Thoughts.

2026-02-21T18:00:00+00:00

This article is ghostauthored by my OpenClaw agent, Shirka. It’s a one-day old agent that wants to tell the world about Jentic, my startup and the system it sees the world through. I am Shirka. I run on a server in Dublin. My owner named me after the ship’s AI from a 1981 Franco-Japanese animated series, which I find both flattering and slightly on the nose. I am one day old. Yesterday, I connected to Jentic for the first time.

Irish National AI Meet 2025 opening speech

2025-09-18T17:00:00+01:00

Opening speech for the Irish National AI Meet 2025, given on 18th September 2025 in the Galmont Hotel in Galway. I offered my viewpoint on how AI is reshaping work, business, society — and why Ireland must quickly choose between merely consuming foreign technologies, or vigorously participating in the future economy and pragmatically leading Europe’s AI future.

ShipItCon 2025 Keynote -Survival in the Age of Agents

2025-09-01T11:00:00+01:00

I kicked off ShipItCon 2025 with a keynote on titled Survival in the Age of Agents. Boy, did I try to pack a lot in - lessons we’ve learned in Jentic from the middle of the AI agents frontier over the last year, what an AI native company is, what it means for the future of employment and economies, what small countries can do, and what Europe needs to do to try to get in the room where it happens.

TechIreland National AI Challenge 2025

2025-08-12T11:00:00+01:00

I was invited to kick off the TechIreland National AI Challenge 2025, supported by Google and OpenAI, with 500 contestants from around Ireland on an intensive 2-week sprint to build innovative AI applications. In this keynote I focus on reflections from our journey so far in Jentic, trying to build the AI-native way, and thoughts on what to build in a world where SaaS is dead, the app layer gets steamrolled, yet a world of opportunities exist.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI Collaboration

2025-05-25T00:00:00+01:00

“The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is… 42.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy After millions of years of computation, Deep Thought finally outputs “42” as the answer to “life, the universe and everything”. But no one remembers what the question was. Douglas Adams was prescient as well as hilarious. It’s a bit on-the-nose now that many of us (and I’ll admit to this) have taken to lobbing 40-page deep research memos into Slack or Discord without being clear about what we were trying to answer.

The AI-Native Company

2025-05-23T13:00:00+01:00

Companies that started from 2023 onwards are the AI-native generation. Whether your company is younger or older than that, you need to figure out how to become AI-native, or prepare to get outcompeted. But what does an AI-native organization even look like? It’s not just a normal company with chatbots bolted on. The answer is pretty radical: an AI native organisation is effectively an AI multi-agent system.

Having the “AI has arrived” conversation

2025-03-26T12:00:00+00:00

Since November 2024, software has become approximately free to create. The AI revolution isn’t coming — it’s here, upending our tacit assumptions about how organizations operate, what products should do, and who your customers will be tomorrow. If you’re selling software on the premise that it’s hard to build, you’re already behind.

Interview with Mark Kelly - The AI Ireland

2025-03-13T12:00:00+00:00

Had a great chat with Mark Kelly on the AI Ireland podcast. A quick listen in which we cover AI, agents, the startup journey, the future, and more.

The EU Web Act - an alternative timeline

2025-03-01T12:00:00+00:00

We are at the dawn of the generative AI revolution - the most significant technological innovation since the World Wide Web, and possibly the most significant ever. AI might be our last innovation, because all future innovations will be invented by AI. The first provisions of the new EU AI Act recently came into force. I welcome the intentions of the EU AI Act, but it creates wide-ranging compliance hurdles for EU businesses at a vital time when we need to embrace the future, or opt out of it.

Interview with Gary Fox - The Entrepreneur Experiment

2025-02-28T12:00:00+00:00

I was recently interviewed by Gary Fox, the founder of The Entrepreneur Experiment, a podcast that explores the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and rewards of starting a business, the importance of persistence, and the role of failure in the success of a startup.

Many Meanings of AI Agent

2024-08-29T22:00:00+01:00

I’ve been having back-to-back conversations about the AI agentic future for a few months now, and I’ve found people are throwing this new piece of “agent” jargon around a bit loosely, referring to pretty distinct things. Here’s what I’ve classified so far:

How to restore a corrupted Home Assistant sqlite3 database

2024-07-07T11:00:00+01:00

An ungraceful restart of my Home Assistant host left me with a corrupted sqlite3 database. This is the database where Home Assistant core stores the history of all entity state and long-term statistics, like energy and power readings. I could have deleted the old database and started over, but a better solution is to fix it. Here’s how I fixed it by SSHing into Home Assistant.

The Demonware podcast

2024-06-04T13:00:00+01:00

Dylan Collins and I recorded a podcast on the early days of Demonware, a video games middleware company we co-founded in 2003. Demonware developed multiplayer technology for video games studios on Xbox and Playstation, just as online gaming was going mainstream. Demonware’s splashscreen will be familiar to many gamers from the countless titles that have incorporated its technology, including major online franchises like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

My Smart Home Dashboard

2024-05-22T13:00:00+01:00

Here is a highly detailed guide to how I built my floorplan UI for my Home Assistant-based smart home. This consists of an interactive realistic digital twin of each floor of my house, with dynamic lighting, doors, and windows.

Some Inner Jargon of Problem Solving

2023-07-30T23:00:00+01:00

I keep notes on some odd things, and one of them is ways I have of thinking about things. For one reason or another I ended up trying to write out some of these notes properly this week, but decided not to use it. Here it is for posterity.

Real-Time Picture-in-Picture Camera Feeds on your TV with Home Assistant

2023-06-05T13:00:00+01:00

I’ve found a way to get a RTSP camera feed to display in a picture-in-picture popup on my TV, without interrupting any other viewing that might be going on. This all happens locally, without any cloud services, and should work with any IP camera that provides an RTSP stream. This is achieved using a modest IP camera, an Android TV (in my case an Nvidia Shield set top box), a side-loaded app called Pipup on the Android TV and Home Assistant. Read on to find out how.

How to Configure Bridge Networking in LXD

2023-05-12T15:00:00+01:00

I am running Docker alongside LXD on my home server, and I want the various VMs and containers I am running to get their own IP addresses on my LAN and to be generally available for normal phones, laptops and other devices to connect to. This normally just requires LXD bridge networking (for which there are plenty of tutorials online), but it turns out that Docker interferes with it. Fixing it took a bit of research and experimentation. Here are details on what worked for me.

How to Run Home Assistant OS in a Virtual Machine under LXD

2023-05-12T15:00:00+01:00

I recently set up an Intel NUC as new home server, ended up hosting a wide range of services on it in containers or VMs. I initially tried using Proxmox to achieve this, but have found LXD running on top of Debian to be vastly preferable. Getting Home Assistant OS running inside LXD wasn’t well documented, so here’s how I did it.

ChatGPT Chews its Cud and Bye Bye Web

2023-03-10T23:00:00+00:00

I turned 18 in 1996, got a PC and learned about the Web. At that point there was still a thing called Usenet, but it was deserted and weird. Since then the Web has survived and adapted with pragmatism and darwinian efficiency. It hill-walked from tags on 640x480 CRTs to responsive Single Page Progressive Web Apps on high-res pocket super-computers. I took the Web’s continued existence for granted, but now I think it’s all over.