A rig electrician, a dev team's structure: Darren Mitchell on Shadow Clone

Darren Mitchell is a marine electrician and the founder of Smart Maintenance Systems. He wrote this review of Shadow Clone in his own words; we publish it as written. You can check his work at smartmaintenancesystems.co.uk and smsworkboat.co.uk.

I'm a marine electrician. Twenty years offshore, working on everything from crane barges to research vessels. I am not a developer, and not long ago I couldn't build software to save my life.

What I had was twenty years in vessel maintenance, hitting the same issues and the same hurdles over and over again, across different vessels and different companies. Nobody ever fixed them properly. And somewhere along the way I worked out how I'd solve it, a way to bring AI in and actually make life easier for people like me, the ones doing the work. I knew exactly what needed building. I just had no way to build it. I messed about with a load of dev tools convinced I was going to change the world, and got nowhere.

Then Eli showed me Shadow Clone, and how to work with AI properly instead of poking at it and hoping. That was the turning point.

What makes it work for someone like me is the way it orchestrates the job. I don't know how to architect software. I don't know the right order to build things in, how to catch my own mistakes, or what "good" even looks like. Shadow Clone handles that. It breaks the work into proper stages, plans before it builds, builds in focused passes, then has a second AI review the work before it tells you it's done. When you're on your own with no team, that review is like having someone looking over your shoulder who actually knows what they're doing.

That structure is the whole difference. On my own with a raw AI, I got a mess, half-finished bits, things breaking, no idea why. Shadow Clone gave the work an order and a discipline I didn't have and couldn't have provided myself. It's not just "AI writes code for you." It's AI working like a proper development team, planning, building, reviewing, so that someone with no experience ends up with something solid instead of a pile of broken parts.

That's what got me building. It gave a rig electrician the structure of a dev team, and that's what got me off the ground.

Where it's led still doesn't feel real when I write it down. I built Smart Maintenance Systems, an AI-powered maintenance and safety platform for the maritime industry. It won an Innovate UK Smart Grant. It got us into NVIDIA's Inception programme. I've presented it as a case study at Ocean Tech Expo, been through the Tech South West Growth Forge programme, had investor conversations, and just launched our first product, SMS Workboat, a compliance system for small commercial vessels facing new regulations. None of that was on the cards for a rig electrician who couldn't code.

If you've got something in your head you don't know how to build yet, this is the tool that shows you that you actually can. That's exactly what it did for me.

I'll be forever grateful to Eli and the team at Ignis for getting me going on this journey. I wouldn't be where I am without that push, and I'm genuinely excited to see where they take things from here.

Darren Mitchell Founder, Smart Maintenance Systems