Martijn Veldkamp

Category: AI

  • The Exit Door is part of the Architecture

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    Every supplier contract contains an exit clause. Most of us read some form of termination section in a contract. Some have and declared the lock-in problem solved. There was a notice period, an export clause and even a promise to help us leave. Legal had done their job, procurement had done their job, everyone had…

  • They cannot buy ASML

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    For most of this year, the top of OpenRouter’s token leaderboard has been Chinese. Not one model sneaking in at number 8, the top of it, week after week, at something like two thirds of everything flowing through the platform. A year before that the same providers were under 2%. I have been circling this…

  • Luxury Amnesia

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    Every summer I do something that, on paper, makes no sense. I leave a farm that has hot water, rain shower, a real bed, and three horses who expect breakfast, and I go sleep in a field, on purpose, in a tent. Where the water comes out of a communal tap forty meters away and…

  • Did anyone brief the Agent?

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…

  • The Metric that eats itself

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…

  • The Delegation Illusion

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…

  • The Benchmark was never about you

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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.…

  • The Depreciation Nobody Books

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…

  • What I would tell the Board

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…

  • Why Agents are Slowing Us Down (and Why That’s Okay)

    Why Agents are Slowing Us Down (and Why That’s Okay)

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    MartijnVeldkamp
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    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…