Software Engineering

  • Spec-Driven Agentic Software Engineering Is Not Vibe Coding. Here Is the Difference.

    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…

    read more

  • Your AI is not your colleague. Stop treating it like one.

    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…

    read more

  • AI Coding Tools Are Only Exposing Your Weak Software Engineering Discipline

    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…

    read more

  • How AI gives you back control over your software and your profits

    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…

    read more

  • Legacy IT and Technical Debt: What Should We Do With Our Cauliflower Automation?

    Legacy IT and Technical Debt: What Should We Do With Our Cauliflower Automation?

    If, like me, you have been working in IT for a while, you may recognise this: An organisation has a system that has been built a while ago and is up and running. However, after a while, the requirements change. Users discover that they want something extra, or that a specific piece of functionality needs…

    read more

  • 23 Things Engineers Say, and What They Really Mean

    23 Things Engineers Say, and What They Really Mean

    Engineers are a special kind of people. They play a vital role in building our disruptive, digital world. They design systems, solve complex problems, automate processes, and occasionally explain why something “should work” while everybody is looking at a broken screen. Engineers also have their own way of communicating. Over time, I noticed that what…

    read more