Author: MartijnVeldkamp
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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…
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The Second Opinion that wasn’t
You asked ChatGPT whether your strategy made sense. It gave you five well-reasoned paragraphs explaining why it did. You felt better. That feeling is the problem. We have quietly started using AI as a sounding board for big decisions. Architecture choices, technology bets, platform strategies, build-vs-buy calls. We share our thinking, ask the model to…
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Why Single-Lens thinking is harming your Architecture Decisions
# Why Single-Lens thinking is harming your Architecture Decisions During summer when the mosquitos were swarming around our farm, a dragonfly hovered right in front of me. Just hung there, mid-air, perfectly still. My dogs didn’t notice. I couldn’t stop staring. There’s something almost alien about how a dragonfly moves. It can fly in six…