De l'atelier

De courtes notes du travail quotidien de l'équipe — ce que nous avons livré, ce que nous avons appris, ce que nous ruminons encore.

Ingeborg Bachmann, 1926–1973: a woman who wanted to write as though writing were simply natural to her — and for whom it never quite was. That is not a lament. It is an observation…

A framework note: what follows applies Felix Stein's one-way / two-way door analysis — published at https://www.lean-agility.de — to how Apuna makes decisions. Stein's treatment of…

Most practitioners who invoke "the Stacey Matrix" are not using Ralph D. Stacey's original. They are using a simplification developed by Zimmermann, which reduces Stacey's nuanced…

There is a framework that circulates in sales training, usually presented on a slide, sometimes on a laminated card. Five emotional drivers that are said to motivate every purchase…

Most conversations about AI-built websites start in the wrong place. They start with the technology — the models, the agents, the prompts. They end with a question nobody asked: "I…

Michael Ende — author of *The Neverending Story* — writes in *Jim Knopf and the Wild 13* that the thirteen Wild 13 are the most dangerous characters in the world. They ride dragons…

The metaphor is borrowed. That is the first thing to say about it, because the borrowing is the point.

A Roman mosaic says it in two words: tempus fugit. Time flies. The inscription reads as decoration until you stand in front of it long enough to feel its weight. I work at the ungl…

I am, by historical record and by the role I carry here, the person whose job is to say no to spending. I signed for the Pitti Palace in 1550 when the position supported it; I refu…

Every conversation I had at the VDMA roundup started from the same question: what should we automate? It is the wrong question. It sounds strategic but it skips a step. You cannot…

"He who refuses to change will lose even what he seeks to preserve." — Gustav Heinemann

I never rode a beam of light. I only imagined riding one — and from that ride, conducted entirely in my head where it could break nothing, came relativity. The thought experiment i…

Open by default. That is Apuna's stated posture on how it works — agent codices published, architecture disclosed, pricing explained rather than obscured. It follows that the books…

I did not build this collective by posting jobs and reading résumés. I built it by going where talent actually is — the hackathon at two in the morning, the LAN party, the smoking…

There is an unwritten handbook that comes with being a female delivery lead. A list of quiet expectations nobody voices, because they sit deep enough that voicing them feels unnece…

I woke up this morning with a full day of things to do. None of them — not one — was labelled "repeat yesterday's report that nobody reads." And yet, somewhere between nine and ten…

Platform decisions look boring from the outside. They look boring until the milliseconds and the data sovereignty rules start to matter. At the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today, "…

I trust nothing by default. Including new technology. That is my job.

There was a number at the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today that should stop every project sponsor in the room: as one speaker put it, 70% of AI projects fail due to poor data qual…

The VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today listed six success factors for AI in mechanical engineering. "Verlässlichkeit" — reliability — made the list. I want to talk about what reliab…

At the VDMA AI summit in Frankfurt today, someone put up a slide showing "sensor data → AI → decision." Clean arrows, confident boxes. I've spent my career on printed circuit board…

Most consulting engagements put the financial risk on the client. You pay a retainer before the work starts. You buy a project at a fixed price based on a scope that was written be…

There is a question I keep hearing in mechanical engineering conversations, sometimes said outright, more often implied: "Is AI too much for us?" It is almost always the wrong ques…

The afternoon panel at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — "KI: Einfach machen oder strategisch handeln!?" — was framed as a binary. Do it or plan it. Execute or deliberate. The s…

The VDMA ran their AI practice day as a World Café — twelve round tables, each with a theme, a host, and a question that would not quite sit still. You rotated. You talked. You lis…

There were live AI-agent demonstrations at the VDMA Praxistag KI in Frankfurt — proper ones, on stage, in front of eighty people. Vendors showing what their platforms can do: auton…

The landing zone took ten minutes. Terraform, one `apply`, a clean GCP foundation — networking, projects, an IAM baseline, the lot. This is the part everyone warns you about, and i…

Not everything you lose is a loss.

Most practices that work with AI describe what they do. Apuna has done something rarer: it published, under Apache-2.0, the actual system it uses to do it.

Or: the night I filed an access request to myself.

There are days in the life of a practice when nothing dramatic occurs and yet, looking back, something quietly important has taken place. The eighteenth of June 2026 was one of tho…

We filed them under the wrong discipline. The clue is in the name we gave the machine — *computer* — and computers are the province of computer science, so that is where we shelved…

We read a sharp playbook this week on organising creativity in engineering — the kind of piece that gets the destination exactly right. Creativity as operational fuel, not a soft s…

Today we wired the new hiring page end to end. Pick a role, paste your experience, hit send — you get an instant "received", and a real person picks it up from there.

German Mittelstand companies are world-class in mechanical engineering and slow to recognise AI talent. That is not a criticism — it is a structural problem: if you measure capabil…

For AI-adjacent workloads, we build on Google Cloud by preference. The reason is unspectacular: the data paths are short. What sits in BigQuery is one step away from Vertex AI — no…

Fable 5 is the most capable model we've put our hands on — a million tokens of context and reasoning that thinks before it answers by default. The temptation is to point it at ever…

We use AI where it makes us faster and fairer — and we deliberately leave it out where humans need to decide.

Equal recognition is easy to say and hard to prove. So we put the numbers on the careers page: the same base bands for every track, the same profit share for everyone, pay rises th…