Tech, work, and what comes next. Real understanding for experienced professionals navigating AI-powered change.
Every summer, a shoebox wins. For about fifteen years, preparing my German tax return has cost me a weekend plus a few evenings, and quite a lot of swearing in between. Not the tax return itself: I have a Steuerberaterin for that, and she is excellent. What costs me the weekend is everything that has to happen before she can start. Remembering which receipts exist. Finding them. Naming them.…
I regularly use the Perplexity API, whether from the command line or by letting Claude use it through an MCP, as a second search engine for its research. That’s why I paid attention when, about a week ago, an email from Perplexity landed in my inbox with the subject line “Your Sonar workload runs better on Agent API.” The pitch: their newer Agent API beats the classic Sonar models I’d been using,…
Earlier this week, I spent five hours at the WERK1 coworking space in Munich, moving three projects forward at once: the brain dump that would become this blog post, a contribution to an open source project, and a redesign of my blog’s analytics. My AI agents did the heavy lifting. Whenever one of them finished a work package, I reviewed the results, made a few decisions, wrote the next set of…
„Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. / Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch.” — Friedrich Hölderlin, Patmos (1803) ( Near is, / and difficult to grasp, the god. / But where danger is, grows / the saving power also. ) A few weeks ago, I wrote a post titled Thinking with Claude: why Cyborg writing works better than Centaur writing. In the LinkedIn…
TL;DR: AI made the coding part of software fast, and that speed didn’t create chaos so much as expose where your organization was already slow: the hand-offs between teams. The fix isn’t a better tool, it’s better wiring. We rewired Dev and Ops once already and called it DevOps. The next wall, between business and engineering, is coming down the same way. Here’s how to see it, and one thing you…
Last month I sat down with Cris Roata to record an episode of her podcast, Catching More Green Lights in Life . It went live today! Cris asked me what I tell people who are afraid of AI, and I gave the answer I usually give: treat it like an intern, train it patiently, expect the first attempts to be useless. Then I spontaneously said: It’s also a very self-reflective exercise. Many times we’re…
Detailed write-up by Michael Leibovich on how he used Claude Code (inside the Claude Desktop app) for implementing his own Chief of staff setup. As someone running a very similar setup myself , I particularly liked his use-case descriptions and the insights coming out of “externalizing your thinking”. I can totally relate to that! Also, I agree that installing Obsidian and giving Claude access to…
In February this year, I wrote about why I stopped trying to engineer prompts and started delegating intent instead. That post argued the skill of working with AI is managerial, not technical. I still think that’s right. But over the last couple months I’ve noticed something else: even with good delegation, the AI’s output sometimes lands close to what I want and sometimes lands feeling oddly not…
Most people use AI like a search engine with extra steps. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. I did too, until I accidentally stumbled into something completely different. Over the week, I’ve turned Claude into my personal Chief of Staff. What’s a Chief of Staff, you might ask? Think of these people who follow executives around, whispering important things into their ear, and making sure…
Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube, walking through 7+1 examples of how AI has woven itself into my daily life — from the mundane to the surprisingly useful. No demos, no hypotheticals, rather what an actual week with AI looks like for me. Here are the examples I cover, with links to everything mentioned: Thermal Printer CLI — I bought a cheap POS thermal printer (~€70 from Amazon Warehouse…
TL;DR: The best “prompt engineering” technique isn’t engineering at all—it’s delegation. Transfer intent, not instructions. For quick tasks, tell the AI what success looks like and why (the Intent Prompt). For complex work, equip it with context, deliverables, and decision principles so it can navigate on its own (the Delegation Brief). You already have these skills. This post helps you apply them…
According to media pundits, software stocks are “crashing”, and there’s a “SaaSpocalypse” going on. Recently, Noah Smith wrote about “ The Fall of the Nerds ,” painting a picture of software engineers as the new master weavers: skilled artisans about to be displaced by AI-powered looms. Meanwhile, I’m seeing more and more layoff announcements in my LinkedIn feed. My heart and hopes go out to…
I’ve been transcribing my YouTube videos locally for a few months now. It took some trial and error to get a setup that actually works reliably, so here’s what I learned. The problem I wanted good subtitles for my videos—for accessibility, but also so I could feed the transcripts to Claude for generating chapter markers and summaries. The auto-generated subtitles I saw on YouTube weren’t great:…
After 27 years in tech—working at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS, then coaching dozens of colleagues through promotions from both sides—I’ve learned something that most people get backwards: Your career belongs to you. Not your company. Not your manager. Not the promotion committee. Everything else—job titles, paperwork, organizational processes—those are just external factors that either help…
A YouTube viewer reached out to me the other day after watching one of my videos. He’d just started at a big tech company and wanted to know: How do you navigate the fog? How do you figure out what to focus on? What are things to avoid? I’ve felt that fog three times—at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and AWS. And after 27 years and countless conversations with mentees, I think there are three phases…
A 25-year career without goals—and why that worked better than the alternative This guitar is more than 15 years old. It’s my second one—the first was bought and sold in the ’80s. I tried lessons. Self-teaching. Regular practice. Still couldn’t play a recognizable song. Now it collects dust, reminding me of an old dream that never quite worked out. Then in 2018, my wife gave me a ukulele as a…
Most people use AI the way our parents used the Internet in 1995. They’d dial up their modem, check the weather forecast on Yahoo, maybe look up a recipe, and call it a day. The idea that this same technology would eventually let them video call their grandchildren, run a business, or access humanity’s entire knowledge base? Unimaginable. Today, we’re doing the same thing with AI. We use it to…
Watching Werner Vogels deliver his 2025 re:Invent keynote last week, I experienced one of those rare moments where separate threads suddenly converge. There he was, Amazon’s CTO since 2005, laying out five principles for “Renaissance Developers”, and I realized: these weren’t just career advice for developers. They’re a career handbook for everybody in 2026. Because every job is becoming a tech…