The blog · since 2015
Essays, playbooks and field notes from our CTOs, architects and leads. Written for people shipping real product.
A practical guide to evaluating fractional CTO providers in Belgium: the three criteria that matter most, how the four provider types differ, what an engagement should cost, and when a full-time hire is the better call.
AI is changing what small teams can ship, boilerplate gone, prototypes faster, experimentation cheaper. But lower costs of building don't mean lower costs of building the wrong thing. It just means you can do it faster.
AI made writing code faster, but the real economics of software engineering were never about typing code in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
AI won't make software engineers redundant. It will expose what engineering was always supposed to be about: understanding systems, not just writing code.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
AI & agentic tooling
We use AI and agentic workflows daily. From coding agents to AI strategy, we help teams adopt what actually works.
Read our AI insightsEngineering leadership
We <3 sharing content for CTOs, senior engineers and founders with real-world insights.
40+ expert authorsFor investors & VCs
Technical audits, codebase assessments, and risk analysis for portfolio managers making investment decisions.
Explore our investor content
Our staff engineers will get your software (back) on track and lead your engineering team. We prepare our exit from day one: our goal is to bring the software and the team to the right level for us to get out again.
Learn more about software engineeringOur CTOs in residence (or fractional CTOs) inject technical leadership into your team, ensuring the technical aspect of your business gets exactly the right attention.
Learn more about CTO as a serviceWe're the market leader for technical due diligence of SaaS companies in Belgium and The Netherlands, servicing clients all over the world. Investors appreciate our smooth process, sharp opinions and top-notch reports.
Learn more about auditingBehind-the-scenes support for your CTO or technical lead to enhance their skills, drive effective change, and grow their teams confidently.
Learn more about CTO coachingWe can help you find the best talent to join your team. Unlike other recruiters, we are CTOs and software engineers ourselves, and through getting our hands dirty, we know the skills required to make an impact.
Learn more about recruitingSometimes your struggles go beyond the technical. Do you need help evaluating the roadmap or sharpening the vision? What should you build in order to scale? Our product management experts know the way.
Learn more about product management
