Author: MartijnVeldkamp
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Did anyone brief the Agent?
In January 2024, a DPD chatbot told a customer, in writing, that DPD was the worst delivery company in the world. The customer had asked it to. The chatbot agreed, enthusiastically, and then wrote a poem about it. Nobody had run it through media training That is the sentence that should haunt every technology leader…
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The Metric that eats itself
There is a slide that has been appearing in decks lately. It has a bar chart. The X-axis is team names or business units. The Y-axis is tokens consumed. There is a goal line. Some bars are red. The slide is usually called something like “AI Adoption Dashboard” or “Generative AI Utilization” or my personal…
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The Delegation Illusion
I asked my AI assistant to sort my email and hand them over to new director of Vrienden van de Alk. It archived 200 messages, declined three meetings, and replied to an email with a question about project status with a synthesized summary that was technically accurate and contextually completely wrong. It had processed my…
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The Benchmark was never about you
Someone showed me a model comparison last month. Clean slide. Six models, seven benchmark categories, colour coded scores. They had those consultant balls. They’d done the work. They had a winner. I asked what the model did when it hit our legacy integration layer. You know? The one that sits on top of the mainframe.…
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Who Owns the Entropy?
Over the past year I’ve spent four articles naming laws. Laws. Forces that operate on systems whether the teams has read them or not. It was my take on both playing with words and trying to describe the things I saw in the form of Thermodynamic Laws. They were my sarcastic take: Problem energy shifts…
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Designing Systems for companies that don’t exist
Every architecture decision I make comes with a second document nobody asked for. Not the system diagram. The org chart the system will eventually force into existence. Most architecture reviews end after the first one. That is where I start asking uncomfortable questions. The question nobody puts on the agenda Before I sign off on…
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The Depreciation Nobody Books
The CFO asked me why we needed to spend €2M on a foundational piece of the platform nobody would see. I explained the architecture. She nodded politely and asked again. I had given her the right answer in the wrong language. I’ve thought about that meeting a lot. Not because I was wrong about the…
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What I would tell the Board
I have given many board updates on technology. I have been honest in all of them. I have also, in all of them, chosen which honest things to say. This is not a confession. It is a description of how the role works. A board update is not a brain dump. It is a curated…
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Why Agents are Slowing Us Down (and Why That’s Okay)
I’ve seen more posts then I care for where someone proudly presents a dashboard tracking “tokens consumed” as the team’s primary AI productivity metric. Not bugs fixed. Not features shipped. Not incidents avoided. Tokens. As if buying more plane tickets proves you’re traveling somewhere useful. It would be funny if it wasn’t setting up some…
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AI Coding Tools: a bit of a time machine
I think that most people can relate. Over time my career and role shifted. Less time building things directly, more time designing systems, reviewing architectures, and guiding teams. Important work, but further away from the joy of experimenting and writing code. During my Christmas break something changed. Tools like Claude Code have fundamentally changed. They…