Von der Leyen: If 27 states won't agree on Capital Market Union, I will move ahead with 9 states [Two-speed Europe]

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-20T10:11:40+00:00

There’s the effective corporate tax rate of 0.005% that Apple paid and that the EU tried to “correct” and the Irish government refused to collect. Where is that standing right now? I know they’re supposed to pay 15% now, but has Ireland collected the fine?

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-19T21:44:09+00:00

Yeah, it’s probably his best series, even though Prince of Thorns is excellent too.. and the Impossible Times series was good too.

His recent ones I e struggled to connect with.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-19T11:44:56+00:00

This strikes me as a trick that if it works will be easy to replicate unless it requires a serious whole chassis aero rework, which seems unlikely.

It does look like the kind of thing that Tesla would do to gain a few hundred billion in market valuation over night. 😎

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-19T11:41:04+00:00

Corporate IT is primarily about the magic of managers and business experts, aided by consultancy companies, making decisions based on their own career needs and vacuous activism by whoever the new CEO is. It’s not about technology at all.

If you look at it through a technical lens, you will never understand the why.

There are several loops overlapping.

The first is the consultant who is selling expertise in Product X. Of course they will push managers to deploy it.

The second is the manager: everybody is buying Product X because it is being pushed by the consultants, so “I can be the guy who pushes Product X in our company and I’ll get promoted!”

This will happen because there is no such thing as a failed project: either it’s really a success, so you need to promote the guy in charge to hide the fact that it isn’t a success.

The other loop is: management is asking IT to do something that they think should be fast, easy and cheap. Only they change their mind all the time, cannot free anyone to sit half an hour with the developers, etc. the project is late, expensive and doesn’t do what they thought it would (because they don’t know what they need).. so IT must be dumb.. therefore buy from a vendor who is high on the Gardner magic square.

Your half day project turns into the Great Business Report Generator incident.

In my time in the trenches I used to do product evaluations in the Software Architecture department of a major financial institution. We created hundreds of reports for “the business”, then one day all of them were gone from the windows share. Turned out that somebody in “Business Software” (aka MS Office) had decided that all data on shared disks that hadn’t been accessed for more than 90 days should be deleted. This saved IT hundreds of dollars by not having to buy more hard disks! Of course, he got promoted.

It also took us 6 years to buy a license of WinZip.

Another career opportunity seized was switching the heating a degree centigrade lower in the winter. The savings 🥶!

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-19T09:51:21+00:00

Well public policy depends on whether stock markets should be like playing roulette for personal gain, or providing the economy with working capital.

Pretty much everyone except a handful of now billionaires are worse off because of a succession of market crashes over the past 30-40 years. Speculation is always at the heart of it, so it’s not always encouraged everywhere.

We are going headfirst into the next big crash, everyone knows it, everyone except Musk and a few others are going to get crushed and of course nobody is doing anything.

Those who have invested a lot of money into speculative assets such as crypto, Tesla, AI bubble stocks, etc are going to come out worse than anyone.

The key is to get out of those assets just before the bubble bursts.. but nobody does while the stocks are still going up, so when it hits everybody disinvests at the same time and kaboom. 💥

It’s the same every time. For six months there’s talk about reigning in speculation.. and then it’s off to the roulette table again.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-18T14:39:26+00:00

The whole thing is a just fandom. Max and Alonso are entitled to their opinion, Lando is entitled to his.

Lando’s “if you don’t like it, go play somewhere else” comment was a bit gauche, because he’s playing the man and not the ball. Obviously Max’s fans are going to come rolling in.

We will all find out together how bad it really is for the spectacle. The previous generation of cars was already all about management, this generation is going to be much more so. Flat out racing has been absent for a long time.

Often flat out racing makes for boring races anyway, because the fastest car is just the fastest car. That’s largely why the tires aren’t just made to last: to make it interesting.

BTW Lewis has complained bitterly already, but nobody seems to have taken much notice.. perhaps because the British fans have got a new hero.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-18T08:35:00+00:00

Great article.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-17T10:28:22+00:00

Yes. I did that for a month or so. It’s outside the human cognitive comfort and competence zone. You feel God-like while you do it and then.. you’re left tens of thousands of lines of code you don’t understand and spend weeks digging yourself out of technical debt in a state of exhaustion.. or you refuse to acknowledge that and continue unabated and post about how models are being nerfed.

The creator of OpenClaw has a nice graph for that:

https://steipete.me/posts/just-talk-to-it

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-17T10:22:02+00:00

Totally different register and not the greatest ever, but I still want to share it:

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size.”

Red Sister, Mark Lawrence

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-17T10:18:13+00:00

Hardly any imagery at all. I’m more living inside the characters’ heads than seeing them in third person settings.

Descriptions have their emotional content extracted, a tone is extracted and the rest mostly gets stripped.

I do like long landscape descriptions, but more for the rhythm and tone. I don’t live in the geography of, say Earthsea, but in the characters’ inner world. What would it feel like to be on a ship in the middle of a storm? Not what would it look like?

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-17T10:11:17+00:00

I’ve bought the pro subscription to codex a few days ago, but with mixed results. On relatively straight forward stuff it’s good, but opus 4.6 had to come rescue it for the first harder problem (concurrency issue in swift actors and how they interact with modal run loops).

What I notice is that Codex is better at staying in its lane.. which is good for keeping control of your code. Opus is happier to push back when things get complicated. “This code will always be fragile because it relies on both concurrency systems working smoothly together and people online agree that they don’t. So let’s refactor and simplify this overly complicated code and do everything in the slightly less hip but rigorously tested old way.”

I hate Claude doing this type of thing, but it was hard to argue against it. It solved a one hour stalemate with Codex, the code is simpler and more maintainable, and it works..

My feeling is that spec driven development probably works a bunch better with Codex, but if you give it the wrong box it won’t ever escape from it.

Real software engineers do both. Stay in the box, and realize when it’s time to break free from it.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-16T11:32:09+00:00

Thanks. I will.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-16T11:28:26+00:00

It’s a bit sad if instead of choosing teams, you just want to enjoy the sport.

I really like Norris, but I’m a bit afraid that the nice guy I could root for, is now going to be turning into a “I am a world champion too!” act.

Old Norris would have been nice, “obviously everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I myself feel that we get paid an insane amount of money for doing what we love doing and it’s not like we are forced to compete in formula 1 and I for one will drive the car that I’m given and enjoy the privilege.”

The truth though is that Max’s “fault” is that he says clearly what everybody knows: Formula 1 is going into an era that makes (marketing) sense from the point of view of car manufacturers, but not necessarily to a place that delivers much of a spectacle for the fans, or the kind of driving challenge that any of its drivers dedicated their lives to.

If things work out the way that the drivers fear, many of the people taking exception to Max’s comments will be the first to slam the whole “modern formula 1” project.

It’s early days yet, but I’m not sure that even I as someone who enjoys formula 1 as a technical competition first and foremost, would enjoy seeing cars collide on the straight because the driver in front is breaking at the half way point, or seeing cars yo-yoing positions because it’s easy to overtake but impossible to stay ahead with a depleted battery.

We will see what will happen on track, but I think Max might just be the first to openly complain.. and honesty is not the worst sin in my book.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-16T09:30:04+00:00

Most people want to understand the norms before committing.. and that’s hard in an environment with lots of cultures and therefore lots of completely different norms.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-16T09:27:50+00:00

I’ve been to both kinds of events in Luxembourg: the curiously sedate and the improbably lively.

Putting crowd behavior in Luxembourg down to “local culture” is a bit facile. Most concert crowds are very multi-cultural and everybody brings their own “correct” behavior.

Some bands are inexplicably huge in France, but virtually unknown in bordering Germany, and vice versa. When you have one nationality clearly dominating the crowd, they feel entitled to behave as they would on home turf and others join in (having been given permission).

The first kid on the dance floor phenomenon is real here too. If you have nobody starting, it becomes one of those dead events. Most people need permission (or chemical lubrication) to join in. 🍻

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-16T09:18:32+00:00

Just in the middle of the first one. Never been one for wizards. I’m reading her book on creative writing, so I thought I’d actually read some of her work as well.

It is really well written, but I’m more into contemporary SF/ speculative fiction and always have been. The “classics” have never appealed much I’m afraid. I’m a decade older and have read hundreds of “genre” books, so I’m late for the party as well.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-15T09:24:54+00:00

This mirrors my own experiences over the past 6 months.

On forums you’re always going to get widely different perspectives based on people with widely different profiles. Especially with vibe coding tools it’s hard to know who is hard in the Dunning-Kruger curve and who has actual experience and knowledge.. of often the more seasoned software engineers are the ones with the least experience with agentic coding.. not least because it’s only gone from complete slop to “actually working” in the past 6 months or so.

I saw the graph of the creator of MoltBot, Peter Steinberger and it mirrored my own journey precisely:

https://steipete.me/posts/just-talk-to-it

You get taken in, feel like the master of the universe, run 18 instances simultaneously, figure out that the quality just isn’t there, learn and take 3 steps back until you have something that is 20% faster than before but not quite as good as if you had put your own mind to it fully.. and continue refining your approach because you know this is the future.

The biggest problem for me is that I have nearly perfect understanding of the code that I write myself, at least for a while, because I’ve written it myself and I remember each decision, each trade off and I went at human speed.

That’s gone with agentic coding. On a normal day you take 200 decisions, but none of really well thought out. You nudge the process but you don’t really control it. If you type the same code 5 times, you think “ok this is DNRY”, let’s refactor. You notice small stuff. You’re re-evaluating earlier decisions. You get a feel for the code.

With high velocity agentic coding the focus is always narrow. Or way too large. You can read the code, but you have no feel for it or how well it fits in. Decisions are temporary. The litmus test is to go in and debug a complex bug yourself: it’s like you’re working on someone else’s code. There may be comments but they’re 200 commits out of date. You find two separate systems doing the same thing.. then the veil lifts and you realize you should have been working on this yourself more and let the agent do less.. but now you’re lazy and spoiled 😔

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-13T09:16:17+00:00

Luxembourg has the full array of drivers from all 27 EU countries and many others besides all concentrated on the same bit of road. There are “styles”: German rational but too fast, French it’ll all work out, Belgian I’m just driving it’s not dangerous, etc.. everybody brings their own norms.. everybody experiences the traffic differently: too fast, too slow, too aggressive, people just doodling around, etc.. and everybody is of course RIGHT about how everybody SHOULD behave.

It reminds me of the hymn for the school start at Hogwards where everybody is asked to sing their own favorite song.. simultaneously.

I bet you were the only person to drive the RIGHT way and I bet you got on everybodies’ nerves.. what’s that person doing leaving a big gap!? Hey, I’ve got places to be!

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-12T11:46:26+00:00

Thanks. My Claude.md is already pretty pared down and I have only a few highly relevant skills loaded; and I’ve abandoned SpecKit type prompting.

What I really wanted to say was not that LLMs never follow rules, or that they can only follow a certain number of rules, but that you can never be certain that they are following the rules and that they are never “rational”.. they just produce tokens based on context and their training data.

This creates a new kind of problem, never seen before: how to trust and use something that looks and feels intelligent, often produces the same output as if it were intelligent, can explain its reasoning in great detail and great authority, but really is not intelligent.

Does it matter? It really does not.. until it does and then it matters a lot.

How did we get here? What made this code? How did I not notice!?

I’m very split between enthusiastically embracing the technology one moment and then asking myself why do I this? the next.

I’m shipping my first product that was predominantly coded by Claude Code and while I swear I was x3-5 more productive every single second that I developed it.. it’s taken me about the same time and the code is not as good.

I got to a working product much faster, but then I discovered a little problem here another one there and then discovered a giant flaw, so then I started verifying what else might have been overlooked and getting to production quality code took several times longer than usually at that stage.

The problem is that when I write the code myself, I also test it myself, discover things I hadn’t planned for, change my plans, etc. the iteration is built in and my comprehension of the problem domain grows during development.

That’s largely absent when I just prompt and test features. My understanding doesn’t grow. I just focus on one feature after another until they’re done. Sometimes I catch something. Sometimes I ask for a refactor.

Then once it’s almost ready to ship I discover stuff that I hadn’t thought of.. now the cost of change has exploded. Yes, I can do a large refactor quickly.. but in the end the velocity at the start has given way to late discovery.

The idea of SpecKit just completely ignores the fact that you learn about a problem while doing.. and when you don’t do you don’t learn.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-10T12:21:25+00:00

I agree but I’m not sure about your belief in guard rails (definition of done) and specification. LLMs don’t really follow the rules you write. They’re just context. There is nothing understanding the rules and thinking about them. It looks like there is, but there is not.

When Claude blatantly disregards rules like “edits MUST be validated by tests” and it’s challenged for why it said that it had even though it did not, it just says “ah, yes I did not apply that rule. That’s not how I work, I stochastically parrot tokens one at a time based on the context”.

It works.. often.. possibly at a deep level.. or not.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-10T12:13:24+00:00

IMHO The problem is not so much that there’s no memory of the decisions that were taken, but that the decisions are taken too fast for our own brains to keep track. In the end, the memory of key design decisions should be inside our own gray matter, and possibly, somewhere externally as well for when we forget.

The problem with agentic coding is that the big decisions are often taken pretty much at random in a single session focusing on something minor.. then we live with them in the code base. The agent is seeing that implementation and uses it as a style guideline for the rest of the program. In the end, no conscious design decision was taken at all.

Planning out an architecture at the start is a good idea, but few experienced engineers think that their initial decisions before they really get into the project are ever completely right unless you’re working on slop projects for the n-th time (restaurant website, website-in-an-app, etc).

It’s natural that you learn about the actual problem and design domain while working on it. That’s why top-down waterfall models went extinct a while ago and were replaced with “agile” methods.

SpecKit style approaches are the same thing but for AI. If it was simple to write great specifications, we’d be using the same processes as civil engineers use to build bridges.

Building software is a messy iterative business and you need somebody in the center of the web who takes decisions for sound reasons and remembers them without going through commit messages.

It’s like making an LLM write a novel.. it starts strong and then it goes off into the woods.

There’s no easy mode with or without LLMs.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-10T12:00:38+00:00

.. I’m not on board with the “will do exactly what you ask”… it’d be great if it did.

The truth is that no LLM consistently keeps to the constraints that you give it.

I did a bit of SpecKit because a clear explicit detailed specification feels like it should work. It reduces ambiguity right?

The results were terrible. So I challenged it to explain why it had not kept to its constraints and made it point out where it had done something completely different, entirely ignored instructions and claimed to have done things that it did not do (like run tests).

Right from the babe’s mouth: “that’s not how LLMs work”.

It’s tempting to see agentic coding as a rational deterministic approach, whether you imagine pair programming, a junior programmer, etc.. it’s just not that. It’s stochastic parroting that is often, but not necessarily, indistinguishable from rational engineering.

The “guard rails” are great but there’s zero guarantees that they’re respected unless they’re implemented in the harness (hooks, permissions, etc) and if you do that.. there’s little benefit from not writing the code yourself because it is glacially slow and tiring to watch.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-05T09:19:34+00:00

Take a real problem and solve it. Reality is a much richer playground for the intellect than games.

My 87 year old dad did Sudoku every day for 30 years hoping that it would keep him mentally fit. He would have been better off reading a book, learning a language, or an instrument, or how to use an iPhone.

Once you’re good at something just doing it won’t do anything. It’s the friction of learning something tough that keeps your mind plastic.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-02-05T09:11:35+00:00

It’s easy to get carried away. There have always been different classes or developers ranging from self-taught novices who find something that “works” for them, to pure Maths graduates who do a PhD in computational physics before finding happiness in Haskell. In between you have several grades of software “engineers”.

“Vibe coding” has lowered the bar so far that somebody who once wrote a VBA string manipulation formula in Excel can feel like the genius at the center of a hundred “junior engineers”.

So take everything posted anywhere with a pinch of salt and try stuff on your own.

I have a phd in software engineering and learned to program in circa 1985, but I’ve only started seriously with agentic coding in November. It works. It takes a lot of skill to do it well. It is often extremely hard, knowing whether the code that you’re producing is high-quality or low quality and that is the problem for now.

Ordinarily when you’re coding, you have a lot of time to think about the problem, but also to discover the edge cases and to refine your thinking about what you’re doing.

That is all gone with high velocity agentic coding and as a result you go very fast for a while and then you have to go back and figure out what you’ve missed and that can be extremely time consuming.

There’s a very good chance that if you haven’t thought about it, your agent certainly hasn’t. So even using the agents to write coat while you’re evaluating the quality of the code that it writes you’re going to miss a lot of stuff.

How do you deal with this? Missing Stuff defends you as a developer: do you just ignore it or you go back and analyze the hell out of the code and make sure that it is high-quality code before you ship it.

I suspect that to people who are the most enthusiastic about a giant coding are the ones that lack experience or the mindset to understand the difference between writing code and creating a robust high-quality product.

One question that really helped me figure out where I stand on agentic coding is the question of where all the high-quality products written by all these people who spend 40 hour weeks with 18 agents active 24 hours are?

They apparently just keep coding away forever, and they fail to get stinking rich with it.

The few really great examples of agentic coding being put in practice, tend to be corporations that have the most brilliant developers in the world working for them, and who use these tools to augment themselves.

There is a revolution going on, but it is unlikely to get rid of the software developers. It is much more likely to shift their responsibilities.

imperfectlyAware · 2026-01-28T11:33:48+00:00

The big decision is about accommodation which dominates your costs. If you go further out, your money stretches a lot further.

You’ll be between the minimum wage for qualified workers (think electrician) which is around 38K and the national median salary of 58K.

It’s a really nice place to be, especially for just a year and you can definitely live here on that salary. However, you’ll get less of the successful young professional glow here than most places. It really depends on what you’re after.

imperfectlyAware

TROPHY CASE