Calum Bell · Chief Technology Officer, Elanco Animal Health
Platforms, people, and the habits that make a big company move like a small one.
I've spent a decade proving that a few engineers with the right platform can serve thousands — most recently a private AI assistant used by 12,000 colleagues, built by a team of fewer than six. I write here about how that kind of work actually happens.
Selected work
Rebuilding a global enterprise, cloud-native
The 2018 Lilly spinoff rebuild across Azure and GCP — no corporate datacentres left at the end of it.
Read →Golden paths with Terraform
From a 25-day ticket queue to 25-minute self-service, with policy as code inside the pull request.
Read →Developer experience as strategy
Onboarding from 30 days to 30 minutes, innersource by default, and AI pair programming, measured.
Read →Writing
Local Models on Apple Silicon: What the Numbers Actually Look Like
OpenCode's free local models run on the Mac I already own. Here's what the throughput looks like, how it compares to the DGX and Framework machines I have access to at work, and why the bottleneck in /games is nowhere near the model.
Claude + OpenCode: Token Costs, Model Switching, and What a Non-Technical User Built
How swapping Claude Opus 5 High for OpenCode's free DeepSeek models changed the token economics of rebuilding /games for Bec's circle, with per-second throughput stats, code-quality heuristics, and a comparison graph of weekly token limits.
From Wordle Sheets to Game Panels: Building /games for Bec's Circle
How a coaching prompt for a non-technical user sparked a five-game web platform, rotating events, and a small revolution in how a group of professionals track daily scores.
An Agentic Bake-off: Antigravity vs Claude Code
I replaced the site I hand-built in 2018 with one built almost entirely by coding agents — running Google's Antigravity and Anthropic's Claude Code at the same job to see where they differ.
Developer Experience as a Strategic Advantage
Onboarding went from 30 days to 30 minutes. Innersource became the default. DevEx is not a perk — it is the compound interest of an engineering organisation.
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