The blog · since 2015

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CTOs & investors.

Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.

Latest posts

AI

Agentic engineering is a bottleneck

The standard AI-assisted dev loop has created a new bottleneck: us. Peter Eysermans describes how deterministic orchestration via n8n, with GitHub as shared memory, gets the human off the loop without sacrificing quality.

AI

You're reviewing the wrong file

When an AI agent gets a requirement wrong, the mistake lives in the test assertions, not the implementation. Domain knowledge catches it, not coding skill.

Leadership

Be a lobster

The processes that got you here will eventually constrain you. Like a lobster shedding its shell, scaling companies must periodically dismantle what worked intentionally, not in panic. Constraints aren’t a failure; they’re proof you’ve outgrown your current structure.

Leadership

Who teaches the next generation?

AI has removed the junior work that used to build software engineers. Seven other industries faced the same disruption and didn't agree on an answer.

AI

Stop calling it vibe coding

"Vibe coding" has become shorthand for bad engineering to some people, but does the label hold up? This post unpacks how a playful term coined by Andrej Karpathy became a verdict, and why that's costing teams more than they realise.

AI

Beyond prompting: read, verify, implement, learn

LLMs generate code fast, but knowledge debt accumulates quickly. The fix is living documentation, and this post shows how to turn your LLM into the partner that maintains it automatically.

AI

Nobody learned a city from a map

The fastest way to learn agentic development is to stop studying it: move in, extract repeatable patterns into skills, and reflect to compound.

Engineering

Hosting shared document services - WOPI

Ever wanted to build your own Google Docs-style document service? This post introduces WOPI, the open protocol that lets web applications embed Office document editing directly in the browser, while keeping your app in control of storage and permissions.

Communication

The disconnect between management and engineering

A mobile app, past its usefulness, was days from being phased out. One email reversed the decision. No discussion. No input from engineering. This is what happens when decision-making drifts too far from the work.

AI

Bots and Boundaries: Two problems, one policy (Part 3)

In part three, we look at both sides of the AI contribution debate. A working patch, real demand, never submitted, rejected because AI was involved. But maintainers are unpaid volunteers, and AI halved the cost of contributing without touching the cost of review. Both sides have a point.

AI

The artificial Turk and our role as software experts

We smile at the 18th-century crowd for being swept up by a box with a man inside, yet today it's easy to hand ChatGPT a vague idea and treat the PRD it returns as gospel. Generative AI is genuinely powerful. We get the best from it when we bring both enthusiasm and a critical eye.

AI

From opt in to default

Developers don't skip standards because they're careless, they skip them because there are fifteen things to remember and the code was the hard part. The real question isn't which tasks your LLM handles well. It's what's still slipping through ungated.

AI

Hire for divers

The AI wave is here, and the industry is already splitting into two: those adapting fast and those falling behind. The gap is widening quickly.

AI

Three Claudes walk into a codebase

The machines aren't replacing developers, they're promoting them. You're no longer just writing code; you're managing agents, reviewing output, and setting standards. Three Claudes walk into a codebase, and suddenly you're a manager.

AI

Running multiple Claude accounts without logging out

Managing multiple Claude Code accounts across machines gets messy fast. Jean-Claude keeps the useful parts in sync, separates account-specific config, and makes switching between personal, team, and client setups far less painful.

AI & agentic tooling

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We use AI and agentic workflows daily. From coding agents to AI strategy, we help teams adopt what actually works.

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Engineering leadership

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