Sharing my thoughts, one coffee at a time.

Personal blog of Serge van Namen

Agentic "Else Clause"

In most organizations, software still behaves like a bureaucrat with a laminated checklist. If the input doesn’t match a predefined rule, the system shrugs, pushes you into the else clause, and returns a sterile “cannot compute.” These rigid structures once made sense, simplicity was a survival strategy. But the world has grown messier, and our systems have not. Agentic AI marks a shift from rule-following to sense-making. Instead of halting at the edge of what’s explicitly programmed, an agent can explore the space just beyond the known. It can evaluate incomplete data, form tentative hypotheses, negotiate uncertainty, and still move the task forward. In other words, it doesn’t need the map to contain the territory. ...

November 17, 2025 · 251 words · Serge van Namen

When the Whales Meet the Sharks: NVIDIA’s DGX Spark and the Open-Source Models closing the Gap

In the ocean of artificial intelligence, there are the whales — OpenAI, Anthropic, the great leviathans of scale and compute — and then there are the sharks. The sharks are smaller, faster, purpose-built. They don’t dominate by mass but by motion: precision, agility, and the instinct to survive where the giants cannot turn quickly enough. Until recently, the gulf between whale and shark was existential. The whales had the data centers, proprietary datasets, and trillion-parameter architectures. The sharks had cleverness and intent, but little muscle. Today, two currents are changing that: the rise of accessible hardware like NVIDIA’s DGX Spark, and the accelerating maturity of open-source large language models (LLMs). ...

November 10, 2025 · 855 words · Serge van Namen

Complexity Reduced, Not Erased

When you turn a car key, or press a button on the dashboard, you don’t think about the compression ratios of cylinders, the synchronized timing of spark and fuel, or the cascade of sensors reporting data back to the onboard computer. You think: the car starts. That is abstraction. But notice: the complexity hasn’t vanished. It sits there humming under the hood, absolutely essential. If the timing chain slips or the fuel injection falters, your abstraction collapses. What abstraction has done is reduce your burden of dealing with this complexity, without pretending it isn’t there. ...

August 25, 2025 · 379 words · Serge van Namen

Agentic AI: Beyond Software Development, Toward Architecture of Thought

Building AI agents with LangChain, or any agentic framework, starts innocently enough. You define a tool, give the agent access, perhaps wire in some prompts, and watch as it begins to reason and act. But then the complexity creeps in. Quickly, one realizes this is not software development in the classical sense. The metaphors of functions, classes, and control flow, which served faithfully for decades, begin to feel like the wrong map for this terrain. ...

August 18, 2025 · 516 words · Serge van Namen

Agentic AI for Brownfield Software Engineering

Since Lovable Launched its agent, in my opinion, is the turning point towards consistent value creation by Agentic AI. For prototyping ideas and merging product design and software in one entity is where it shines, but what about brown field scenarios in software development? When people talk about agentic AI, they tend to imagine a kind of digital colleague—capable, tireless, and independent—capable of running through the backlog while the rest of the team enjoys a leisurely coffee. ...

August 11, 2025 · 778 words · Serge van Namen

Small Steps, Big Impact: Rethinking Application Modernization

We’ve all been there. The quarterly board meeting where “digital transformation” gets thrown around like confetti, followed by whispers of massive IT overhauls and million-dollar modernization projects. But here’s the thing—application modernization doesn’t have to be a moonshot. Start with Business Pain, Not Technology Hype Before you even think about containers, microservices, or whatever’s trending on Hacker News this week, ask yourself: what’s actually hurting the business? Technology exists to serve your organization, not the other way around. Yet too often, I see teams diving headfirst into architectural rabbit holes without understanding the business problems they’re solving. Your CTO might be excited about Kubernetes, but if your real issue is time-to-market for new features, maybe the answer isn’t orchestrating a thousand containers. ...

August 7, 2025 · 498 words · Serge van Namen

Programming with natural language

What effectively changes with software development in the AI era, is that you are going to program with natural language instead of machine language. We made machine language somewhat easy to understand by humans through time (sixties until now-1) and is mandatory for people to understand and use for mundane tasks and software implementations. The understanding requirement part of mundane stuff will disappear, so you spend more time on the creative process instead of the technical process. This will make the (global) economy scale. ...

August 5, 2025 · 84 words · Serge van Namen

Business Goal (Agile) Software Engineering

In the agile universe, we constantly translate business needs into actionable work. Traditionally, this process unfolds through a clear hierarchy: Epics break down into Spikes, Spikes further unfold into Stories and (Sub-)Tasks. Each step refines abstraction into tangible work packages, providing engineering teams clarity and structure. Yet, solely relying on Epics and Stories to articulate business intent carries inherent limitations, often leaving gaps between technical teams and stakeholders. Epics and Stories naturally embody a detailed narrative—a roadmap defined primarily from a “ground-up” perspective, detailing the “what” and “how.” While thorough, this bottom-up approach can obscure the broader purpose, causing stakeholders to feel disconnected amidst technical detail, uncertain about the ultimate business value. ...

June 23, 2025 · 381 words · Serge van Namen

Automating Thought: The Real Value of the AI Revolution

The AI revolution, at the time of writing, didn’t arrive like an asteroid crept in like weather. Gradual, persistent, and deeply altering. We woke up one morning and it was here, everywhere: auto completing emails, filtering resumes, writing poetry, grading code, recommending products, forecasting churn. In boardrooms and bedrooms, AI became the silent co-pilot. The buzz was about intelligence. Artificial, general, narrow, super. Debates flared about sentience, risk, regulation. But underneath the hype and hand wringing, a quieter question lingered: What actual value has AI brought us? ...

May 19, 2025 · 681 words · Serge van Namen

Application Modernization Without Deprecation

We’ve been sold a lot of reinvention in the past decade. Cloud-native architectures, Kubernetes-first everything, throw away the old and start clean. But reality is stubborn: enterprises have decades of investment in legacy systems, sprawling VM fleets, bespoke configurations—and yet they’re under pressure to “modernize” yesterday. The problem isn’t just technical. It’s economic. You can’t simply deprecate your previous investments, nor should you. What you can do is rethink your build artifacts. ...

May 6, 2025 · 434 words · Serge van Namen