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2026

  • 6 min read

Thinking big

Remember February 2020, watching the covid virus spread overseas and wondering what would happen? Matt Schumer writes something big is happening: "I think we're in the 'this seems overblown' phase of something much, much bigger than Covid." He's an AI developer and entrepreneur, talking about how shocked he is with the last few months of AI developments.

Shumer's article has been criticized as alarmist. We don't know yet how jobs will be affected. But the reality right now is: I no longer have to write code. Instead I build on a higher abstraction level, describing in plain English what I want. I wrote about the tipping point for me last November (My Opus Moment). This new 'discipline' of writing software is being called 'agentic engineering'. But it's not just software that will be affected by these new AI models. I'm still recalibrating and wrapping my head around all the implications. There's more reason for hope rather than fear. This post collects some of my current thoughts.

  • 9 min read

What you can do for European Digital Sovereignty

We pay for insurance but hope we never need it. It's the same with digital sovereignty: we should never need it, yet we really can't go without. For me, the urgency of independence from American technology really hit home in Jan 2026 when Trump imposed tariffs on the Netherlands for sending troops to Greenland to prepare an Artic NATO defense mission. America threatening to take possession of an allied, sovereign country by military force really shook Europe awake, and rightly so. Although earlier warning signs were already clearly there. Like when in May 2025 the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (based in The Hague) lost access to his Microsoft email after Trump imposed sanctions. Or maybe already back in 2018 when the US CLOUD Act was enacted, that obliges US companies to provide data "in their possession, custody, or control", regardless of where that data is stored. So while Amazon might announce products with names like AWS European Sovereign Cloud, they are not sovereign because they do not have jurisdictional immunity.

  • 4 min read

My Opus 4.5 Moment

The "ChatGPT moment" was November 30, 2022, the day OpenAI released the first version of ChatGPT. It wasn't just a technological leap; it was a usability leap that took an LLM and put it behind a simple, free chat interface that reached 100 million users in just two months.

If you had asked me a year ago about LLMs for coding, I would have explained they were helpful but overhyped. They wrote some functions I would refactor, and I often got stuck in a loop of pasting error messages with "fix this". But then, just 3 years after the first ChatGPT, on 30 November 2025, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5. I realized I was wrong: I had my Opus moment.