Blog

Trust but Sandbox

Coding agents can now do (almost) everything. They read and write every file you have access to, they run arbitrary commands, talk over the network, read your environment variables, and drive your browser with all your cookies. In the spirit of an agentic workflow, where we let agents work as autonomously as possible, that is actually the point, because it is exactly what makes them useful. Even so, we should find a way to gain more control over what happens in there.

Blog Post

Beyond Claude & GPT

Sure, we enjoy trying out the latest frontier model as much as anyone. But in day-to-day project work, what matters most is control over cost, data, and availability. That’s why we increasingly rely on open-weights models paired with open source tooling. Here’s what our setup looks like.

Blog Post

Stop Using Bearer Tokens Like House Keys

DPoP with Heimdall

Blog Post

Alternatives to U.S. Artificial Intelligence

Claude and GPT have transformed the way I write software, but I’m becoming increasingly uncomfortable with rising costs, vendor lock-in, and our growing dependence on a handful of U.S. providers. After exploring local models and open-weight alternatives hosted in Europe, I was surprised to discover that some lesser-known models can already handle much of my day-to-day work.

Blog Post

Faster Is Not Better: On Experimentation Culture and What It Costs

Faster experimentation sounds like an obvious advantage. But experimentation culture is not a universal paradigm. It is a product of a very specific context. And the people who bear the heaviest cost of poor product development never appear in any experiment.

Blog Post

OpenProject: A Real Alternative to Jira?

Blog Post

The Agentic Trio

The Product Trio separated discovery from delivery because delivery required a larger team. Agentic development removes this constraint. That changes what a product team can look like.

Blog Post

RAG and Fine-Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t always produce reliable results. In practice, one thing becomes clear: combining Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning can make them more robust. This post explains how the two approaches complement each other – and why a production feedback loop is critical.

Blog Post

Die 1%-Methode für Code und Architektur: Modernisierung als Gewohnheit

Blog Post

Using the space, not optimizing the treadmill

Features per unit of time is not a meaningful metric. What counts is whether they satisfy a real user need and contribute to a desired outcome. Agentic development opens up the space to finally take that seriously.

Blog Post

The Missing Half of Your Data Strategy

In order to stay competitive, a modern data architecture is essential. It enables sound decisions and data-driven development at all levels, from strategic choices to feature prioritisation and buy-or-build decisions. The ability to collect, understand and act on data is no longer optional. Many organisations recognise this and are investing in data mesh initiatives and similar approaches. Through modern infrastructure and self-service platforms, they aim to democratise access to corporate data. However, these platforms often fail to fulfil their potential because people still do not know how to work with data or what value they can derive from it. For a successful data strategy, this has to change. Let’s talk about data literacy.

Blog Post

Nebu: Self-made sovereignty

How I’m building an enterprise chat server with agentic development that simply doesn’t exist.

Blog Post

Accidental Complexity in the Heart of Software

Domain-Driven Design went mainstream over the last ten years – in parallel with a wave of digitalization and modernization projects. That is not a coincidence. And it explains a lot about why so many of these projects fail to deliver what they promise.

Blog Post

Hail Mary: Why domain knowledge cannot be extracted from experts

AI agents promise to replace weeks of requirements workshops with hours of structured interviews. The pitch is compelling. The cognitive science is not.

Blog Post

From Vibe Coder to Agentic Engineer

How to Take Ownership of AI-Generated Code

Blog Post

The Right Kind of Hard

More structure, more output, more exhaustion. Spec-driven development has helped me get better results from AI agents – and drained my energy in the process. About dead weight, false clarity, and hidden costs I didn’t plan for.

Blog Post

AI Features for Jira Data Center – No Atlassian Cloud Required

Imagine this: after every customer meeting, structured Jira issues are created automatically. You just paste your notes into an AI, and it does the rest. Atlassian already offers that kind of magic in Jira Cloud: natural-language search, automatic summaries, and issue creation from unstructured text. But not everyone wants to move to the cloud, and many teams plan to keep using Jira Data Center through 2029. In this article, we show how to get many of the same benefits on-premises with Jira Server and your own AI stack: GDPR-compliant, resilient to Cloud Act exposure, and without data leaving your environment.

Blog Post

Where AI Helps (and Hurts) Across Different Coding Scenarios

My takeaways from Stanford University’s Developer Productivity Study

Blog Post

Spec-Driven Architecture: When Agents Build, Architecture Must Speak

Spec-Driven Development gives agents a clear foundation for implementation. What it doesn’t solve is how a portfolio of systems stays coherent. Spec-Driven Architecture applies the same principle at the architecture level, using contracts as versioned boundaries and guarantees—enforceable in agentic workflows and in the CI/CD pipeline.

Blog Post

REST Beats MCP

Instead of using dedicated APIs, agents can operate existing web applications directly. Like humans, they rely on the most consistent implementation of hypermedia and benefit from existing context, validation, and access controls. Using an expense report as an example, I show how agents can automate complex, context-dependent tasks—without having to implement new APIs.

Blog Post

Spec-Driven Development is Domain-Driven Design’s Impatient Cousin

Why BMAD won’t save you

Blog Post

The right size of a Data Product

Setting the boundaries of data products incorrectly can lead to integration issues, unclear ownership and duplicated logic. This guide offers practical heuristics for creating data products of the right size.

Blog Post

Agents good in the end?

Software development consists of a constant chain of trade-offs. As long as I’ve been building systems, there have always been things you don’t do despite wanting to do them. But now, with agents, we can fulfill all our dreams and finally build everything we always wanted and had the feeling we were missing. Spoiler alert: we shouldn’t do that.

Blog Post

Understanding AI Coding Patterns Through Cognitive Load Theory

Developing with AI through the cognitive Lens

Blog Post

Ein Überblick der AI-assistierten Softwareentwicklung in 2026

Birgitta Boeckeler (ThoughtWorks), Heinrich Hartmann (Zalando) und Sven Johann haben sich über den aktuellen Status der AI-assisted Software Entwicklung unterhalten: was ist wirklich Wichtiges in 2025 passiert? Welche stabilen Muster können wir ableiten? Was gibt Orientierung und Einordnung? Und natürlich ein paar Einblicke in den Future of Software Engineering Retreat in Utah an dem Birgitta teilgenommen hat. Die Unterhaltung gibt es natürlich auch als Podcast. Dieser Artikel ist aber eine menschlich kuratierte Zusammenfassung.