Leadership
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Spec-Driven Agentic Software Engineering Is Not Vibe Coding. Here Is the Difference.
Most teams using AI coding agents are not doing agentic software engineering. They are doing expensive prompt guessing at scale. There is a difference, and it matters more than the tool you picked. The tooling conversation has been loud. Claude Code from Anthropic. ChatGPT Codex from OpenAI. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf. A new agent lands…
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Are You Already Running Performance Reviews With Your AI Agents?
AI agents are moving beyond experiments, demos and internal productivity tricks. They are starting to support important business processes. In some cases, they will take over parts of those processes completely. That changes the question. And that is much harder to answer than most dashboards suggest. A green status light tells you that the agent…
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Your AI is not your colleague. Stop treating it like one.
This article is about the alternative. Not the safe, boring alternative. The rigorous one. The approach that makes AI dramatically more useful precisely because it treats AI as the powerful but institutionally clueless tool that it is. Vibe coding works. Until it doesn’t. Vibe coding is not stupidity. It works well for a wide range…
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AI productivity does not come from watching better answers appear
Most organisations are not short of AI tools. They are short of better ways to organise work around them. That distinction matters. Because the current debate about AI productivity is often too simple. One camp says AI will make everyone radically faster. Another camp says the gains are mostly hype. Both are missing the practical…
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When the Person Who Keeps Everything Running Announces He’s Moving to Spain
Every company has one. The person who keeps critical systems alive through a combination of institutional memory, personal relationships, and a folder structure that would make an archaeologist nervous. His name doesn’t matter. Let’s call him Harry. Who Harry Is Harry has been with the company for 40 years. He wears a Queen Magic Tour…
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AI Coding Tools Are Only Exposing Your Weak Software Engineering Discipline
AI Coding is the end of pretending your engineering process is mature. The pitch versus the reality Every vendor demo looks the same. A developer types a vague instruction. The AI returns clean, working code in seconds. The crowd applauds. Another slide promises “10x productivity.” What the slide does not show: the codebase those snippets…
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The Timeline Paradox: Decoupling Industrial IoT Data from Physical Assets
How modular data architecture and open standards put asset owners back in control There is a structural issue in the market for data-driven asset management that is rarely stated explicitly: the supplier of your asset also wants to become the supplier of your data. That may be understandable from the supplier’s business model. But it…
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How AI gives you back control over your software and your profits
AI driven software engineering frees companies from the constraints of SaaS software licences, but only with the right approach. Jan Baan and Ad Nederlof say out loud in their article in the dutch paper FD what the IT sector has known for years: SaaS software companies systematically skim off their customers’ productivity gains. AI offers…
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When Siemens Energy Must Choose: Your AI Data Center or the Grid That Powers It
The energy transition has a bottleneck that rarely makes headlines. Not a shortage of wind turbines or solar panels. Not a lack of capital or political will. A structural shortage of power transformers, switchgear, and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) connections. The physical components that move electricity from where it is generated to where it is…
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The Power Grid Does Not Know What You Know
The Dutch electricity grid is congested. That diagnosis is no longer controversial. What remains poorly understood is why the flexibility that could relieve that congestion is sitting idle behind millions of meters, owned by businesses and households who have neither the information, the incentive, nor the trust to put it to use. The problem is…
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Why People Avoid Responsibility at Work; And What It Costs Your Organisation
Everyone has a colleague who has mastered the art of not being responsible for anything. Deadlines passed? “The brief was unclear.” Project failed? “We were waiting on approval.” System broken? “That’s not really my area.” Nobody sabotages an organisation on purpose. It happens one convenient excuse at a time, until the excuses become the process.…
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How AI Makes Ignorance Sound Intelligent (And How to Spot It)
There is a Latin-derived word for the habit of giving opinions beyond your competence: ultracrepidarianism. It refers to the shoemaker who critiques a painter about his technique. Similarly, the dinner-party guest who corrects the surgeon about a medical procedure, and the co-worker who has read one article and is now a marketing expert. “The confident…
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The Scary Takeover: The Day Your AI Tool Became Your Boss
We love talking about AI transformation. Keynotes, roadmaps, pilots, proof-of-concepts. Big words, bold ambitions. Every conference has a slot for it. Every board agenda has a line item. And yet, for all the noise we make about AI strategy, the most consequential shift isn’t happening in the strategy decks. It’s happening in the background, in…
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TenneT, The Backbone of the Economy Under Strain, But Cannot Be Allowed to Break
What TenneT’s 2025 Annual Report Tells Us About the Dutch High-Voltage Grid: the Backbone on Which Our Digital Economy Rests. Beneath our digital and industrial prosperity lies the Dutch high-voltage grid: a national infrastructure already running at its limits, while the true peak of the energy transition is yet to come. That tension is largely…
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Your Innovation Pilots Are a Graveyard.
Time to Stop, Bury them with a distinct Ceremony. Most innovation pilots in large organisations are not experiments. They are expensive theatre. A team is assembled, a budget is allocated, a vendor is selected, and a steering committee is formed. Six months later, a slide deck lands in front of a board that politely nods.…
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Stop Saying You Want to Hire People Better Than You
“Hire people who are better than you” is one of those management statements that sounds wise, generous, and mature. It is also often nonsense. Not because you should not hire strong people. You absolutely should. But because most leaders who say this are not making a serious statement about talent. They are making a flattering…