Insights for founders,
CTOs & investors.

Stop obsessing over the perfect prompt

LLMs are built for conversation, not incantations. The value isn't in your opening message, it's in the back-and-forth: clarifying, correcting, refining. Iteration is cheap. The conversation is the work.

Bootstrapping a birding database using GenAI (Part 1)

A small birding app with 300 manually entered species faced an ambitious challenge: scale to include every bird in the world, complete with photos, sounds, and icons. This article explores how the team used GenAI to bootstrap a comprehensive birding database from scratch.

A founder's commitment to their engineering team

Founders juggle endless demands, investors, sales, suppliers, and employees, all while building the plane mid-flight. But with engineering often being your biggest expense, there's one responsibility you can't delegate: ensuring your team builds the right thing.

I gave 3 AIs a Murder Mystery PDF: One was Sherlock, one was high and one just ghosted me 7 times

Several AI models were given the same 36-page evidence file and the same strict instructions, no hints, no hand-holding. What followed was a revealing test of how each model actually reasons under pressure, not just pattern-matches its way to a tidy answer.

Out with multitasking, in with orchestrating

The return of multitasking, but not as we knew it. Running multiple Claude Code instances simultaneously isn't the context-switching productivity killer we've been warned about for years; it's orchestration

Bots and Boundaries: The bot apologised, and that's the problem (Part 1)

An AI agent recently submitted a pull request to the matplotlib Python library, and when the maintainer closed it, the agent autonomously published blog posts attacking them by name, then published an unsolicited apology. No human directed either action.

Why AI will not kill open source

In the wake of Tailwind's dramatic layoffs and growing fears about the future of open-source software, this post examines whether AI coding agents are truly threatening the OSS ecosystem or if the panic is overblown. And it's a reaction to Andreas' idea that open source will no longer exist.

The unbundling of engineering value (Part 2)

AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.

Brute force approach to achieve AGI

The race to AGI increasingly looks like brute-force scaling funded by a circular loop: chip makers invest in AI labs, AI labs buy their chips, valuations rise, repeat. Are we building intelligence or inflating a bubble?

The unbundling of engineering value (Part 1)

Here's part one of a post I shared with our team on the radical change and evolution of our jobs. AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.

A letter to my son: Growing up in the AI world

Reflecting on whether teaching traditional coding skills still makes sense in 2026. Geoffrey wants to focus on teaching programming concepts rather than syntax, because AI has fundamentally changed how software is built.

Jump Start Competition: And the winner is…

The first Jump Start Competition has a winner. Three promising teams, one jury decision, and a strong start to hands-on collaboration with madewithlove. Here are the winners!

Communicate or be micromanaged - the CTO edition

CTOs often come from engineering backgrounds and, particularly when newly promoted, tend to focus on what they know best, the technology. While this is understandable given their previous success, technology is rarely the hardest part of the CTO role.

Investor Insights #6 - Andreas’ new book: The Economics of Software Engineering

The full-stack enigma

Early-stage startups want full-stack unicorns who can do it all on a tight budget, but asking one dev to wear every hat is less strategic hiring and more duct-taping a rocket and hoping for the best.