04 — Notes
Written while the work was happening
Field notes and thought leadership.
Code is now free, Software is not
I wanted to write this post for several months now, just because of my own experiences and also what I hear more and more from my network. The executive summary sentence goes something like this: "We...
AI Is Beginning to Imitate Art
About 30 years ago, I had the pleasure of reading the science-fiction novel The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan. In the novel, an AI named Spartacus is put in charge of an isolated space...
Fable 5 Joins the 3D Maze Runner Race
A Continuation of the Opus 4.8 vs. GPT-5.5 Rematch In the last round I compared Opus 4.8 in Claude Code with GPT-5.5 in Codex on the same 3D maze runner challenge I had used before. Both did well....
Your Agent Framework Doesn’t Matter - Your Data Boundary Does
I recently worked through a practical problem that many enterprise teams will run into when using LLMs: how do you use powerful frontier models without exposing proprietary data unnecessarily? I...
Opus 4.8 vs. GPT-5.5: The 3D Maze Runner Rematch
A Head-to-Head Comparison of AI Coding — Round Two Introduction A while back I pitted Opus 4.5 against Kimi 2.5 in a 3D maze runner build-off. This is the rematch. I had hoped to run this round with...
Opus 4.5 vs. Kimi 2.5: The 3D Maze Runner Showdown
A Head-to-Head Comparison of AI Coding Introduction Over the weekend, I put two leading AI models to the test: Opus 4.5 (using Claude Code) and Kimi 2.5 (using Opencode). The challenge? Build a...
MCP + Context: engineering for the context – hard lessons learned
Intro I have built my own orchestration framework because most of what I’ve seen was too complex or tried to lock you into creating workflows a certain way. I wanted something very simple and yet...
Antigravity + Gemini 3 are serious contenders
The News Google’s rebirth as the AI behemoth it was always meant to be has finally come to fruition. With the release of Gemini 3, Google has made it clear that it can compete with—and even...
How I Ended Up Creating an AI Playground to Illustrate and Educate
TL;DR AI Playground User Guide From a Conversation to a Spark Recently, I participated in a World Café event organized by CareerTeam . The topic was how AI is being used in HR and beyond. My original...
Vibe Coding Alert! How I Rebuilt a Wix Site and Fed the “AI Will End SaaS” Panic
My better half is an artist and maintains a Wix.com site. For the second time in two years, Wix decided to raise the hosting fees. That’s when I suggested to my spouse that I could rebuild the...
Gemini CLI and Manus changed my website
Back in April, I wrote about the verticalization of coding agents by comparing OpenAI’s Codex and Claude Code . Since then, I haven’t really used Codex — Claude Code just keeps getting better and...
A New Wave of Vertically Integrated Coding CLIs
Yesterday, OpenAI released Codex, a response to Anthropic’s Claude Code. Here’s a summary from ChatGPT what they actually do: Anthropic’s Claude Code On February 24, 2025, Anthropic quietly rolled...
I've Been Vibe Coding for 2 Months, Here's What I Believe Will Happen
In the past few months, I've embarked on an experiment that has fundamentally changed how I approach software development. I've been "vibe coding" - essentially directing AI to build software for me...
When Bitcoin Hits $100K and AI Goes Mainstream: Whose Revolution Are We Really Watching?
Over the last decade, two seismic waves have taken shape in the digital realm. On one hand, we have the cryptocurrency movement, championed by Bitcoin and its ideological siblings, seeking to...
Are Small Language Models the future of GenAi?
I did a little experiment. I asked ChatGPT 4o (in the cloud) and the Llama 3.1 70b model (locally via Ollama), the same question: "What verse changes did Schiller make for Beethoven's 9th symphony?"....
Is the payment industry finally being shaken up by … Apple?
My starting point for this is the evolution of the Android SmartPos and in particular the version at the lowest common denominator also known as SoftPos, which allows most Android phones to become...
The new shiny armor of AI
If we listen to the media, business leaders, and the press, we should be getting behind the AI wagon because of its potential to automate many of the processes everyday companies struggle with. I...
The case for central bank digital currency as public infrastructure to enable digital assets
I have dabbled a fair amount with all sorts of crypto currencies and their respective permissionless networks. In fact, I have been dabbling since 2012 which is by my last count a whopping 12 years....
Apples Vision Pro Headset strategy is all about its Arm-chips.
Apple has given us a vision of what their VR and AR future might entail. But as have others pointed out numerous times, the whole point of the showcase at the WWDC 23 was to let people experiment,...
Is crypto the new dot-com?
The idea for this post came from Molly White’s blog partly because of the FTX collapse, but also because I have memories of an eerily similar era... Molly White could not have experienced it (she is...
Is Web3 the new world order, or just utopia?
As it is with all technological change, every industry must understand, assess, and prepare to incorporate the “new” with the existing. The payment industry, which is undergoing almost constant...
Is the Metaverse a future we want or a construct of commercial interest?
Quo Vadis, Metaverse? If you read popular Science Fiction, then you probably already have an idea of what the Metaverse is or at least how it is portrayed. Basically, we would be immersed in a...
Information technology is no more
As many have during the summer, I have taken a break and did some reading. To my amazement, I have seen the term of “IT” or information technology in much of the literature that I read over the...
Apple is Arming itself
I’m still following Apple and developments in hardware and software in general as it is still somewhat of a hobby of mine (having started my professional career developing on NeXT). Even after I have...
Make no mistake, we’re not going back to “normal”
Yes, there’s so much speculation as to what our medium- and long-term future might look like in a post-COVID19 world. If you read the newspapers and magazines ( here , here , and here ) you will have...
What investors, innovators and entrepreneurs get wrong about distributed ledger technology and blockchain
I’ve been looking at distributed ledger technology since 2012; I’ve tried to mine bitcoins and ethereum; I’ve made several bets, participated in ICOs and tried to comprehend some of the underlying...
What the car industry and wallstreet get wrong about Tesla
Every time I watch a car review that includes a Tesla somewhere, it is always fascinating how the reviewers react. They try hard to compartmentalize the Tesla into their existing matrix and...
The first electric Porsche
The title is in fact a redundant expression. When I say the first electric Porsche, I’m not talking about the new Porsche Taycan . No, I’m talking about the first Porsche car that just happens to be...
You are go, now dance the skies
The PBS documentary “Apollo’s daring mission” explains how the Apollo 8 mission was changed because the US and NASA feared that the USSR would beat them on a mission to the moon. So they changed the...
Will Libra change the world?
I have some history with this – no, not directly but I’ve been researching the various attempts that Facebook made in order to enable their user base to make person to person as well commercial...
I paid my barber online
It finally happened, I made an online reservation and saw a payment option for my barber. So I paid my barber before getting service. Of course you can ask yourself would I have done that had I not...
On (digital) transformation
Digital transformation and agile are all the rage these days. However, for companies that have existing businesses and services, every change is hard and in some cases (mine) really hard. I wrote...