Het stomste aan een mentale stoornis hebben, is dat die nooit helemaal weggaat nadat je ervan af bent gekomen.

Het is zo’n litteken dat gerust eens in de zoveel tijd opnieuw opengaat.

Zo kan ik me op sommige dagen nog steeds zonder reden enorm gespannen voelen, omdat ik de deur uit moet.

Als een echo uit een tijd dat ik jarenlang elke dag gespannen was om de deur uit te gaan.

Hoewel deze spanning niet precies voelt als toen en ik weet dat ik de controle heb, is leuk anders.

Wat ik doe op dit soort momenten, is mijn mentale noodpakket erbij pakken.

In dit pakket zit het volgende:

• een playlist genaamd KALMTE
  
• mijn comfortfilm
  
• mijn favoriete spirituele boek
  

In mijn playlist staat maar één liedje. Ik druk op de repeatknop en zet daarna het liedje op. En vanaf de eerste tonen gaat mijn ademhaling automatisch naar beneden.

Het nummer heet The Lotus Eaters van de band Dead Can Dance.
(Ik kan gerust uren praten over hun muziek.)

Vertrouw de techniek niet. Zorg er ook voor dat je het liedje echt in bezit hebt. Via een cd of als digitaal bestand. Laat je niet verrassen als je ergens in de bergen zonder 5G in paniek raakt en je kalmtenummer nodig hebt. Zorg dat het fysiek op je telefoon staat.

Ik weet bijvoorbeeld dat sommige mensen mijn podcast opzetten om een paniekaanval weg te ademen. Heel goed. Wees voorbereid. Maak playlistjes aan met je favoriete afleveringen en download ze.

Ik heb bijvoorbeeld mijn favoriete boek zowel fysiek, digitaal als luisterboek. Er ligt een exemplaar bij mijn computer, in mijn boekenkast in mijn werkkamer en in de kast in de woonkamer. Zodat ik er altijd overal direct toegang toe heb.

Het is het boek van Thomas Moore (1940) — met dubbel o — genaamd De donkere nachten van de ziel.

Als ik gek word van mijn perfectionisme bij mijn teksten, sla ik het boek A Guide for the Perplexed van Werner Herzog (1942) open om zijn radicale visie op kunst te lezen.

Het inspireert enorm.

Net zoals ik de film Palm Springs (2020) opzet als ik echt niet kan slapen en mijn gedachten me gek maken. Het is mijn comfortfilm. Ik kan er geen genoeg van krijgen.

Nu een opdracht voor jou:

• Maak een lijstje met wat jou kalm maakt.
• Denk aan liedjes, films, podcasts, boeken, objecten.
• Vraag je af of al deze dingen binnen handbereik zijn in je leven.
• Zo nee, schaf extra kopieën aan.

Je volgende trauma is altijd dichterbij dan je denkt.

Wees voorbereid.

In het laatste seizoen van de misdaadserie Breaking Bad (2008) ziet Walter White eindelijk in voor wie hij het allemaal deed in het leven.

• Niet voor zijn familie
• Niet voor de (terugkerende) kanker in zijn lijf
• Niet voor zijn zoon, die een lichamelijke beperking heeft
• Niet voor zijn vriend Jesse
• Niet als wraak op zijn vroegere beste vriend en zijn ex-geliefde, die een succesvol bedrijf begonnen met zijn ideeën

Nee.

Hij startte een drugsrijk voor zichzelf.

Gewoon voor zichzelf.

Hij was alleen te egoïstisch om dat in te zien.

Hij praatte seizoenen lang al zijn slechte daden goed. Inclusief moord, vernieling en het overspoelen van de straten met zijn zelfgemaakte drugs. Dat hij het voor anderen deed.

Wie kan er nou tegen wat ambitie zijn om je familie zonder zorgen achter te laten als je sterft aan kanker?

Binge-watch een middag een Amerikaans real life-spelprogramma en je wordt overspoeld met mensen die meedoen om hun familie trots te maken en hopelijk met veel geld terugkomen om aardig gevonden te worden.

Niemand die zegt: ‘Ik sta hier, omdat ik denk dat mijn leven minder waardeloos voelt als mensen me op straat herkennen van tv.’

Ik vraag me ook altijd af voor wie mensen in januari naar de sportschool gaan. De maanden ervoor heb ik ze niet gezien. En na februari ga ik ze ook niet meer zien.

Dus voor wie doen ze het?

Die ‘nieuw jaar, nieuwe ik’-motivatie-wind-in-de-rug is voor niemand voldoende om een nieuwe routine in te bouwen. Het moet uiteindelijk toch volledig uit jezelf komen en dat is blijkbaar niet aan de hand.

Volgens komiek en zelfhulpgoeroe Jimmy Carr (1972) is dit probleem simpel te tackelen.

Vraag niet ‘wat iemand doet in het leven’, maar ‘waarom je doet wat je doet?’

Wat?

Nee. Waarom.

Als de wat en de waarom niet hetzelfde zijn, is het wachten op een existentiële crisis omdat je het allemaal niet meer weet.

Ik wil daar graag de vraag aan toevoegen voor WIE je het doet.

Wie zegt dat je buikje er niet mag zijn? De samenleving? Die ene op wie je indruk wil maken? De stem van je moeder uit je jeugd?

Of ligt het probleem dieper?

Waarom blijf je maar ongezond eten in huis halen? Waarom blijf je maar snaaien?

Welke leegte probeer je te vullen?

Of is het gewoon simpeler?

Je vindt het lekker en je hebt geen zelfdiscipline?

Ik oordeel niet.

Maar je denkt van wel. Dat ik oordeel.

Waarom denk je dat?

Doe ik je aan je vader denken?

Zo’n zelfcrisis is niet erg.

Er zullen er nog vele in je leven volgen. De melancholie gaat je nog regelmatig opzoeken.

Om jezelf weer in het gareel te brengen. Om uit te vogelen wat je volgende stap in het leven wordt. En die stap willen we graag begrijpen. Daarom is de ‘waarom’-vraag zo belangrijk.

Zodat je op een dag kan concluderen wat Walter White concludeerde in het laatste seizoen:

‘I did it for me. I was good at it. And I was really… I was alive.’

Liefs,

tomson darko

195 pages Edited by Susan Kaye Quinn (2024)

Read this if you like: Solarpunk, short speculative fiction, inventive worldbuilding

tl;dr summary: Collection of shorts that each imagine a hopeful future in a different way

See the book on Bookshop 

One of the coolest things about science fiction is its capacity to inspire actual change in the real world by showing people what's possible. There are plenty of examples of technology imagined in the pages of a novel and later created in a physical form. And it can have a similar impact on how people think and view the world. This is one of the reasons I've been getting more into solarpunk. It's an antidote for that overwhelmed hopelessness that sets in when I think about climate change and how incredibly fucked the planet is. Stories might not be able to solve the whole problem, but I like reading about one potential way that we could sidestep disaster (or at least be okay, still, after the disaster happens). I also feel a smidge of hope knowing that someone has put a solution out into the world that, just maybe, someone else can run with to make some aspect of reality just a little bit better.

All of the stories in this collection nailed that spirit of solarpunk. There are elements of nearly every story that are depressing or downright terrifying on their own: a flooded future Rio de Janeiro; a derelict space station populated by giant centipedes; an invisible beast trapped behind a city fence. But these potential downers serve as jumping off points for very hopeful narratives, and that ability to find the points of light hidden inside something very dark is really what's so magical about solarpunk in general for me.

Getting a bit more specific with this collection, I found the worldbuilding to be on point across the stories. They were consistently able to ground the reader in a very vivid setting without bogging it down with tons of description. ”The Doglady and the Rainstorm” especially is a perfect example of how using the right specific details can build an entire world in just a few paragraphs. The opening image is the main character, Joseane, boating down a street-turned-canal between vertical gardens, accompanied by the buzz of pollinator drones. By the second page, I'm fully anchored in a place and can place it roughly in the semi-near future, and I'm ready to move with Joseane through this world. 

“Centipede Station” is another one where the worldbuilding is on-point and accomplished very quickly through choice descriptions (it also just might be my favorite, though that's a hard choice because all of the stories have their strong points). In the first two paragraphs, we understand both that Pebble and Moss are on a space station, and that we're dealing with something more organic than what you might expect from that setting. It's not easy to both establish and subvert a reader's expectations that quickly without giving them whiplash. It's accomplished here by keeping the language straightforward and the characters central. It doesn't start with a zoomed-out view of the station—it starts with two characters huddled around a campfire, then extends outward to the centipedes chittering in the dark, then finally hovers over them to show the context. 

Something else I enjoyed about both of these stories is how they defied reader expectations. I've read stories set in flooded cities before, but never one that focuses on a dogwalker as a protagonist like “The Doglady and the Rainstorm” does. Telling the story through that unexpected perspective, and then adding in the surprise wrinkle that she has a paralyzing fear of rainstorms, makes the familiar trope feel completely new. With “Centipede Station” I was able to see the ending coming from fairly early on, but in that “I feel smart” way, not a way that kills the tension. Instead, it shifts the tension, away from a fear of the centipedes and the environment and more toward the other layers, like how the characters are dealing with their grief while navigating this alien landscape. 

As a cryptid fanatic, “What Kind of Bat Is This?” was pretty much written for me to love it. It has a somewhat familiar setup: a scientist, Bree, accidentally falls into an unsearched cave and in the process stumbles across a long-hidden form of life. What I like is how this premise is balanced against Bree's relationship with Izzy, a former colleague. The emotional arc isn't just the combination of fear and excitement associated with discovering a new species, but also Bree's complicated relationship with Izzy, and the way it sours what should otherwise be an incredible discovery. I also like the way it comes around at the end, with the ultimate conclusion being one of sharing the joy and working together, which is a spirit I think is central to the idea of solarpunk in general. 

When it comes to which stories in the collection I think have the most helpful and in-the-moment beneficial message, “A Merger in Corn Country” tops that list, I think. The premise of this one, in brief, is that a sustainable commune buys the farm next to an old, set-in-his-ways corn farmer. And spoiler: it doesn't veer into the obvious conflict you'd expect from that set-up. Instead, it's generally a warm-fuzzy feel-good romp, and I enjoyed every minute of it. The voice really helped with this. It's charming and folksy without veering into caricature. There isn't a ton of conflict or tension in the story—but in this case, I feel like that's the point. In a way, the reader’s expectations generate the main tension. I, at least, just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for there to be some big fight and falling out between Dennis and the commune, and I was glad to be proven wrong and have the story go a different direction. 

“The Park of the Beast” has the darkest, most ominous feel of all of them. At first, I would say there's a more dystopian vibe to the caged-off substation than the utopian world most of the stories inhabit. But there's a quirkiness to the voice that lightens it, pushing it more toward absurdism than horror. The beast is frightful, but described in a way that makes it feel like something to root for more than something to fear. Maybe I'm reading into this, but it felt to me like the narrator was eager for the day the beast would break free of its cage, like it would be the force that freed all of them from a larger fear. I liked that inversion of the expected, and that's what kept it feeling like it belonged in this collection.

I think it's fitting that  “The Park of the Beast” comes after “Ancestors, Descendants” because it's another one that starts off feeling more dystopian. It opens on the protagonist alone in his town after the rest of its inhabitants abandoned it; when he does find more people, they're not exactly friendly. This turns in the second half, though, and ultimately the arc is one of finding strength in community. From a craft standpoint, I was impressed by how “Ancestors, Descendants” covered such a broad span of time and still gave the reader characters to care about. It's written as a kind of diptych of flash pieces, each with its own arc. That's an unusual format but one that works for this story because it keeps the characters completely separate in the reader's mind, and lets them fully sink into each world and get to stay with each character for a whole stretch.

“Coriander” feels like an excellent anchor for the collection for multiple reasons. For one, I like the symmetry of starting and ending with flooded worlds. In the case of “Coriander”, that world is the city where her great-grandmother (her ah-zho) grew up. The narrator is there to connect with her lineage, and that mission also puts the story in conversation with “Ancestors, Descendants.”

I often focus on the individual stories in a collection, but the overall reading experience is important, too, and Bright Green Futures does an excellent job in that regard. The variety of settings and voices keeps each story feeling fresh, but they have enough of a thematic thread running through them that they feel like they all belong together. I'd definitely give this collection a strong recommend for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the solarpunk genre. 

 

See similar posts:

#BookReviews #ShortStory #Solarpunk #SciFi #WorldBuilding

Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The Victory of Notre Dame

In places West of here The champions of change forego And Justice have- in the forecast More than supple rain And the Earth to be our Water Justice Rome Things of portence view Assaults in trial and view The subtle preoccupation In time a bliss report To barren optics and unclear The victim path But we were weary in support I’m seeing other paths- this victory due In time will change the atmosphere And messy wars to challenge- the natural view It’s favoured here Loving simple mountains Bare on top And robots receiving oil Never in need of oil affects the better- and their heir We suit as human And playing for Paris go This is us- til Tuesday And victory again For subtle paths we wonder Can calm assaulted be But through blue brine Epistles of the few And Justice Marry The solemn maybe Clearing chance For our message- End of oil.

Portence Few and Fame

The nuts to be elastic By the shouts of providence sound Accostive by the exit For poem in right The day of this is landing To single Heaven be No more chairs for the good This standing genre In your time a life unmet Misery hall and syncopath Burdens to the relate A travel beam to Scotland And sure by day That nothing goes alone Beams of twer And quanticy unveered Simple analog with sound A German woman For all this salad hers Beamed from Upper Clement’s I miss her And strike the laser red Hues of green escape And socio here for day In England’s news A rose to North Korea But not Embargo seeks the cheese And daybreak machine Forgotten rose A 404 not found.

The Copland Esteem

And ready count So surely but found in Water The way we spoke- Insular and twenty A horticulture view There were shouts antagonistic And lighting events Perfect for our madness And twiddled watch Given unto her- Our single wonder omen Pittances review This time a fortune year Filing by friend and mercy wonder The Economy at bay Simple is our home And distance new The times repeat for reason Architectures real And accelerants to know What does happen is A soul between for just And higher Earth will be our Rome And Easter boom Places counted fifty Insolvent doom But borne of people And day within The certain one Would capital acclaim The victory won And new to the famous A fact in charter case Facts above in view To rectify the past And present call Our Wonder.

⭐️✨

The star between the Sun Affording life ever after Insoluble fiber within And sympathy on the grass And hewing poems Distributing other worldly A day’s quota Blinking at your fear Erasing it Then folding new To your preferences of heat, and light And mercy on all men Blinking at thirty watts And visible down the street Cousin mayhem And five points shelter Going it alone By five and her between This substance Q And matte effects of dew For foreign friends And very last frostbite Amen to you- clemency be Above of here Forever.

The numbers paint a picture of paradox. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools in their development process. Yet in that same survey, more developers actively distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust them (33%). Only a fraction, just 3%, report highly trusting AI output. The most experienced developers show even deeper scepticism, with senior engineers recording the lowest “highly trust” rate at 2.6% and the highest “highly distrust” rate at 20%.

This trust deficit exists for good reason. GitClear's analysis of 211 million changed lines of code reveals that code churn, the percentage of lines reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored, has climbed from 5.5% in 2020 to 7.9% in 2024. The percentage of code associated with refactoring has plummeted from 25% in 2021 to less than 10% in 2024, whilst duplicated code blocks have increased eightfold. For the first time in GitClear's measurement history, developers are pasting code more often than they are refactoring or reusing it.

The 2025 DORA Report, titled “State of AI-assisted Software Development” and surveying nearly 5,000 technology professionals globally, confirms what many engineering leaders suspected: higher AI adoption correlates with higher levels of software delivery instability, even whilst improving outcomes at nearly every other level. As the DORA researchers concluded, AI accelerates software development, but that acceleration can expose weaknesses downstream. Without robust control systems, an increase in change volume leads to instability.

This is not a story about whether AI coding assistants work. They demonstrably do. GitHub reports developers code 55% faster with Copilot. Microsoft's AI-powered code review assistant now supports over 90% of pull requests across the company, impacting more than 600,000 PRs monthly. The question is not capability but control: what structural mechanisms prevent this accelerated code production from accumulating technical debt that will cripple systems for years to come?

The Bottleneck Has Moved

For decades, software development bottlenecks resided in implementation. Teams had more ideas than they could code, more designs than they could build, more requirements than they could fulfil. AI coding assistants have relocated that constraint. The bottleneck is no longer writing code; it is verifying it.

Qodo's research on the state of AI code quality in 2025 captures this shift precisely. AI coding agents increased output by 25 to 35%, but most review tools do not address the widening quality gap. The consequences include larger pull requests touching multiple architectural surfaces, growing merge queues, regressions appearing across shared libraries and services, and senior engineers spending more time validating AI-authored logic than shaping system design.

Engineering leaders report that review capacity, not developer output, has become the limiting factor in delivery. When 80% of PRs proceed without any human comment or review because an AI review tool has been enabled, the question becomes what quality signals are being missed. The 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that the biggest single frustration, cited by 66% of developers, is dealing with AI solutions that are almost right but not quite. The second biggest frustration, reported by 45%, is that debugging AI-generated code takes more time than expected.

The traditional approach to code quality, manual review by experienced developers, cannot scale to meet AI-accelerated output. Code review times have ballooned by approximately 91% in teams with high AI usage. The human approval loop has become the chokepoint. Yet eliminating human review entirely creates precisely the conditions for technical debt accumulation that organisations seek to avoid.

GitHub's latest Octoverse data shows monthly code pushes climbed past 82 million, merged PRs reached 43 million, and 41% of new code originated from AI-assisted generation. AI adoption reached 84% of all developers. The delivery side of the pipeline is expanding, yet the code review stage remains tied to the same human capacity limits it had five years ago.

The Vibe Coding Reckoning

The term “vibe coding” was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 and named the Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2025. It describes an approach where developers accept AI-generated code without fully comprehending its functionality, leading to undetected bugs, errors, or security vulnerabilities. Whilst this approach may be suitable for prototyping or throwaway weekend projects as Karpathy originally envisioned, it poses significant risks in professional settings where a deep understanding of the code is crucial for debugging, maintenance, and security.

The numbers tell a sobering story. A quarter of the Y Combinator Winter 2025 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. According to YC managing partner Jared Friedman, “It's not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Every one of these people is highly technical, completely capable of building their own products from scratch. A year ago, they would have built their product from scratch but now 95% of it is built by an AI.”

Yet by the fourth quarter of 2025, the industry began experiencing what experts call the “Vibe Coding Hangover.” In September 2025, Fast Company reported that senior software engineers were citing “development hell” when working with AI-generated vibe-code. A study by METR found that applications built purely through vibe coding were 40% more likely to contain critical security vulnerabilities, such as unencrypted databases.

The risks manifested dramatically in real incidents. In May 2025, Lovable, a Swedish vibe coding application, was reported to have security vulnerabilities in the code it generated, with 170 out of 1,645 Lovable-created web applications having issues that would allow personal information to be accessed by anyone.

Simon Willison, a respected voice in the developer community, stated plainly: “Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly risky. Most of the work we do as software engineers involves evolving existing systems, where the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial.”

YC general partner Diana Hu offered a nuanced perspective: “You have to have the taste and enough training to know that an LLM is spitting bad stuff or good stuff. In order to do good vibe coding, you still need to have taste and knowledge to judge good versus bad.” This requirement for human judgement becomes the foundation for understanding why structural controls matter.

Technical Debt Vectors in the AI Era

Understanding how AI-generated code creates technical debt requires examining the specific mechanisms at work. Ana Bildea, writing on AI technical debt, identifies three primary vectors: model versioning chaos caused by the rapid evolution of code assistant products, code generation bloat, and organisation fragmentation as independent groups adopt different models and approaches.

These vectors interact multiplicatively. A team using GPT-4 generates code in one style whilst another team using Claude generates code in a different style. Both integrate with legacy systems that have their own conventions. The AI tools optimise for immediate task completion without awareness of broader architectural context. Each generated component may function correctly yet contradict established patterns elsewhere in the codebase.

The Ox Security report titled “Army of Juniors: The AI Code Security Crisis” outlined ten architecture and security anti-patterns commonly found in AI-generated code. The research found that AI-generated code introduced 322% more privilege escalation paths and 153% more design flaws compared to human-written code. AI-generated code is highly functional but systematically lacking in architectural judgement.

Forrester predicts that by 2025, more than 50% of technology decision-makers will face moderate to severe technical debt, with that number expected to hit 75% by 2026 due to AI's rapid growth. CodeScene's research demonstrates that unhealthy code exhibits 15 times more defects, requires twice the development time, and creates 10 times more delivery uncertainty compared to healthy code.

The financial implications compound over time. CISQ estimates that nearly 40% of IT budgets are spent maintaining technical debt. A Stripe report found developers spend, on average, 42% of their work week dealing with technical debt and bad code. If AI assistance accelerates code production without corresponding attention to code quality, it simply accelerates technical debt accumulation.

The problem extends beyond individual codebases. As more AI-generated code enters training datasets, a troubling feedback loop emerges. Georgetown University's Centre for Security and Emerging Technology identified this as one of three broad risk categories: downstream cybersecurity impacts including feedback loops where insecure AI-generated code gets incorporated into training data for future models. The technical debt of today becomes embedded in the AI assistants of tomorrow.

Gatekeeping Mechanisms That Actually Work

The solution emerging across successful engineering organisations involves mandatory architectural review before AI implements major changes, combined with automated quality gates that treat AI-generated code as untrusted by default.

CodeScene's approach implements guardrails across three dimensions: code quality, code familiarity, and test coverage. Every line of code, whether AI-generated or handwritten, undergoes automated review against defined quality standards. Their CodeHealth Monitor detects over 25 code smells including complex methods and god functions. When AI or human introduces issues, the monitor flags them instantly before the code reaches the main branch.

The quality dimension requires teams to define their code quality standards explicitly and automate enforcement via pull request reviews. A 2023 study found that popular AI assistants generate correct code in only 31.1% to 65.2% of cases. Similarly, CodeScene's Refactoring vs. Refuctoring study found that AI breaks code in two out of three refactoring attempts. These statistics make quality gates not optional but essential.

The familiarity dimension addresses knowledge preservation. When AI generates code that bypasses human understanding, organisations lose institutional knowledge about how their systems work. Research from the 2024 DORA report reveals that 39% of respondents reported little to no trust in AI-generated code. This distrust correlates with experience level, and guardrails should institutionalise this scepticism by requiring review from developers familiar with affected areas before AI-generated changes merge.

The third dimension emphasises test coverage. Comprehensive test suites serve as executable documentation of expected behaviour. When AI-generated code breaks tests, the violation becomes immediately visible. When tests pass, developers gain confidence that at least basic correctness has been verified.

The 40-60 Rule and Human Oversight

The most successful teams have developed heuristics for balancing AI automation with human oversight. The emerging consensus suggests using AI for 40 to 60% of review tasks, including syntax checking, pattern matching, and basic security analysis, whilst reserving human review for critical paths. The guidance is clear: never automate 100% of code review. Human oversight remains essential for business logic, architecture, and compliance.

This balance requires explicit frameworks. Organisations should establish clear workflows that combine automated checks with manual oversight, promoting accountability and reducing the risk of introducing subtle errors. Effective code review blends the speed and consistency of AI with the judgement and creativity of human engineers.

Certain domains demand particular caution. Teams should never skip human review for AI-generated code touching authentication, payments, or security. Most advanced AI code reviews catch 90% of bugs, making them highly accurate for common issues. However, they work best with human oversight for complex business logic and architectural decisions.

The statistics on developer experience with AI underscore why this balance matters. According to Qodo's research, 76.4% of developers fall into what they term the “red zone,” experiencing frequent hallucinations with low confidence in shipping code. Approximately 25% estimate that one in five AI suggestions contain factual errors. These numbers make the case for structured human oversight inescapable.

A three-layer architecture has emerged as a recommended starting point: real-time IDE feedback for immediate guidance, PR-level analysis for comprehensive review, and periodic architectural reviews for systemic evaluation. Organisations configure these layers properly, maintain human oversight for critical paths, and tune for false positives over time.

Continuous Integration Without Continuous Chaos

The challenge of integrating AI code review into CI/CD pipelines whilst maintaining both velocity and quality has driven significant innovation in 2025. The goal is not to slow development but to prevent instability from propagating into production systems.

Microsoft's approach demonstrates what enterprise-scale integration can achieve. Their AI-powered code review assistant started as an internal experiment and now supports over 90% of PRs across the company. Per early experiments and data science studies, 5,000 repositories onboarded to their AI code reviewer observed 10 to 20% median PR completion time improvements. The key insight is that AI review does not replace human review but augments it, catching mechanical issues so human reviewers can focus on design intent and system behaviour.

The risk-tiered approach borrowed from regulatory frameworks proves particularly effective. Minimal-risk applications like AI-generated marketing copy or meeting summaries receive light-touch reviews: automated quality checks, spot-checking by subject matter experts, and user feedback loops. High-risk applications involving financial decisions, security-critical systems, or architectural changes receive mandatory human review, audit trails, bias testing, and regular validation.

Guardian Life Insurance exemplifies this approach. Operating in a highly regulated environment, their Data and AI team codified potential risk, legal, and compliance barriers and their mitigations. They created two tracks for architectural review: a formal architecture review board for high-risk systems and a fast-track review board for lower-risk applications following established patterns.

The most effective teams have shifted routine review load off senior engineers by automatically approving small, low-risk, well-scoped changes whilst routing schema updates, cross-service changes, authentication logic, and contract modifications to human reviewers. This selective automation maintains velocity for routine changes whilst ensuring human judgement for consequential decisions.

A well-governed AI code review system preserves human ownership of the merge button whilst raising the baseline quality of every PR, reduces back-and-forth, and ensures reviewers only engage with work that genuinely requires their experience.

Specification-Driven Development as Variance Reducer

Perhaps the most significant methodological shift of 2025 has been the rise of specification-driven development (SDD), a paradigm that uses well-crafted software requirement specifications as prompts for AI coding agents to generate executable code. Thoughtworks describes this as one of the key new AI-assisted engineering practices of the year.

The approach explicitly separates requirements analysis from implementation, formalising requirements into structured documents before any code generation begins. GitHub released Spec Kit in September 2025, an open-source toolkit providing templates and workflows for this approach. The framework structures development through four distinct phases: Specify, Plan, Tasks, and Implement.

In the Specify phase, developers capture user journeys and desired outcomes. This is not about technical stacks or application design. It focuses on experiences and what success looks like: who will use the system, what problem it solves, how users will interact with it, and what outcomes matter. In the Plan phase, developers encode their desired stack, architecture, and constraints.

The Tasks phase breaks specifications into focused, reviewable work units. Each task solves a specific piece of the puzzle and enables isolated testing and validation. Only in the Implement phase do AI agents begin generating code, now guided by clear specifications and plans rather than vague prompts.

At its core, spec coding aims for orchestral precision: 95% or higher accuracy in implementing specs on the first attempt, with code that is error-free and unit tested. Humans craft the “what”, focusing on user stories or natural-language descriptions of desired outcomes, whilst setting “how” guardrails for everything from security to deployment.

The problems with AI coding that SDD addresses stem from the fact that vibe coding is too fast, spontaneous, and haphazard. Because it is so easy for AI to generate demonstrable prototypes, many people overlook the importance of good engineering practices, resulting in too much unmaintainable, defective, one-off code. It is important to bring serious requirements analysis, prudent software design, necessary architectural constraints, and human-in-the-loop governance into the picture.

As one commentator observed: if everyone is writing three times more code and your baseline is one security vulnerability per thousand lines, you have tripled your security vulnerabilities. The only way out is guardrails that work at the speed of AI-assisted development.

Deterministic Guardrails Against Probabilistic Systems

The inherent tension in AI code generation lies in applying probabilistic systems to tasks that demand determinism. A banking system cannot approximate correct behaviour; it must be precisely correct. Yet large language models produce outputs that vary with temperature settings, prompt phrasing, and training data distributions.

Deterministic guardrails address this tension by wrapping probabilistic generation in verification layers that enforce correctness regardless of how the code was produced. These include tests, smarter linters, and observability infrastructure that provides reliable behavioural data for verification. AI changes how developers write and review code, increasing the need for strict verification.

Guardrails improve overall system accuracy and reliability through deterministic formatting. By enforcing a schema, organisations ensure the LLM output is always in a format like JSON or XML that code can parse. Self-healing pipelines in many guardrail libraries can automatically re-ask the LLM to fix its own mistakes if the first response fails validation.

The critical insight is that specifications without verification are just documentation. The power of spec-driven development comes from continuous validation through test-driven guardrails. Each acceptance criterion in a specification becomes a test case. As the agent implements, tests validate correctness against spec requirements.

Tessl, which launched spec-driven development tools in 2025, captures intent in structured specifications so agents can build with clarity and guardrails. Their Spec Registry, available in open beta, and Tessl Framework represent a growing ecosystem of tools designed to bring determinism to probabilistic code generation.

OpenSpec, another entrant in this space, adds a lightweight specification workflow that locks intent before implementation, giving developers deterministic, reviewable outputs. The common thread across these tools is the recognition that AI generation must be bounded by human-specified constraints to produce reliable results.

Whilst LLMs do not generate deterministic code like traditional code generation, compiling, or automated test execution, clear specifications can still help reduce model hallucinations and produce more robust code.

Scaling Review Without Creating Bureaucracy

The challenge facing organisations is designing review workflows robust enough to ensure quality and manage risks, yet flexible enough to enable innovation and capture productivity gains. The worst outcome is replacing the implementation bottleneck with a review bottleneck that negates all productivity advantages.

The DORA Report 2025 identifies seven AI capabilities that distinguish high-performing teams: clear and communicated AI stance providing organisational clarity on expectations and permitted tools, healthy data ecosystems with quality and accessible internal data, AI-accessible internal data enabling context integration beyond generic assistance, strong version control practices with mature development workflows and rollback capabilities, working in small batches maintaining incremental change discipline, user-centric focus preserving product strategy clarity despite accelerated velocity, and quality internal platforms providing technical foundations that enable scale.

The platform engineering connection proves particularly important. The DORA Report found 90% of organisations now have platform engineering capabilities, with a direct correlation between platform quality and AI's amplification of organisational performance. As the report states, a high-quality platform serves as the distribution and governance layer required to scale the benefits of AI from individual productivity gains to systemic organisational improvements.

Qodo's platform approach demonstrates how this works in practice. Their context engine can index dozens or thousands of repositories, mapping dependencies and shared modules so review agents can see cross-repo impacts. Standards can be defined once, covering security rules, architecture patterns, and coding conventions, then applied consistently across teams, services, and repositories.

Organisational Capabilities for Distributed Enforcement

The technical mechanisms for preventing AI-generated technical debt matter little if organisations cannot enforce them consistently across distributed or rapidly growing engineering teams. This requires building AI governance as core infrastructure rather than treating it as policy documentation.

As organisations prepare for 2026, one operational fact is clear: AI increases the rate of code production, but PR review capacity controls the rate of safe code delivery. Companies that invest upfront in defining clear controls and guardrails will unlock transformative productivity gains. Those that do not will find AI amplifies whatever dysfunction already exists.

The regulatory landscape adds urgency to this capability building. The EU AI Act's high-risk provisions take effect on 2 August 2026, with penalties reaching 35 million euros or 7% of global annual turnover for prohibited AI practices. Enterprises must demonstrate full data lineage tracking, human-in-the-loop checkpoints for workflows impacting safety or financial outcomes, and risk classification tags labelling each model with its risk level, usage context, and compliance status.

Key obligations taking effect in August 2026 include full requirements for high-risk AI systems spanning risk management, data governance, technical documentation, record-keeping, transparency, human oversight, accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity.

KPMG reports that half of executives plan to allocate 10 to 50 million dollars in the coming year to secure agentic architectures, improve data lineage, and harden model governance. Cybersecurity is identified as the single greatest barrier to achieving AI strategy goals by 80% of leaders surveyed, up from 68% in Q1.

McKinsey's research on the agentic organisation emphasises that governance cannot remain a periodic, paper-heavy exercise. As agents operate continuously, governance must become real time, data driven, and embedded, with humans holding final accountability. Just as DevSecOps embedded automated checks into digital delivery, agentic organisations will embed control agents into workflows.

Building Review Capacity as Organisational Muscle

The shift from implementation bottleneck to review bottleneck requires organisations to build new capabilities systematically. Review capacity is not merely a process to be optimised but an organisational muscle to be developed.

Engineering leaders report several patterns that distinguish successful capability building. First, they treat AI-generated code as untrusted by default. Every piece of generated code passes through the same quality gates as human-written code: automated testing, security scanning, code review, and architectural assessment.

Second, they institutionalise the scepticism that senior engineers bring naturally. Research shows that when teams report considerable productivity gains, 70% also report better code quality, a 3.5x increase over stagnant teams. The correlation is not coincidental. Teams seeing meaningful results treat context as an engineering surface, determining what should be visible to the agent, when, and in what form.

Third, they invest in platform capabilities that distribute review capacity beyond senior engineers. The traditional model where senior engineers review all significant changes cannot scale. Instead, organisations encode institutional knowledge into automated review processes and apply it consistently, even as code volume and change velocity increase.

Fourth, they maintain humans as the ultimate arbiters of quality. The 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that in a future with advanced AI, the number one reason developers would still ask a person for help is “when I don't trust AI's answers”, cited by 75% of respondents. This positions human developers as the final checkpoint, not because humans are always right but because humans bear accountability for outcomes.

Fifth, they establish clear governance frameworks. Reviewer trust erodes if the AI comments on style whilst humans chase regressions. Organisations should define a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) for each feedback category.

The Discipline Premium

The evidence increasingly suggests that disciplined adoption of AI coding assistants produces dramatically different outcomes than undisciplined adoption. Teams with strong code review processes experience quality improvements when using AI tools, whilst those without see quality decline. This amplification effect makes thoughtful implementation essential.

The DORA Report 2025 captures this dynamic with precision: AI does not fix a team; it amplifies what is already there. Strong teams use AI to become even better and more efficient. Struggling teams find that AI only highlights and intensifies their existing problems.

The implications for organisational strategy are significant. Before expanding AI adoption, organisations should assess their existing control systems. Do automated testing practices provide adequate coverage? Do version control workflows support rapid rollback? Do platform capabilities enable consistent enforcement across teams? Do review processes scale with output volume?

If the answer to these questions is no, then accelerating AI adoption simply accelerates the manifestation of existing weaknesses. The technical debt will accumulate faster. The instability will manifest sooner. The costs will compound more rapidly.

Conversely, organisations that invest in these foundational capabilities before or alongside AI adoption position themselves to capture genuine productivity gains without corresponding quality degradation. The 10 to 20% improvement in PR completion time that Microsoft observed was not achieved by eliminating review but by making review more efficient whilst maintaining standards.

Preparing for the Agentic Transition

Looking forward, the challenges of managing AI-generated code will intensify rather than diminish. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will embed AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The transition from AI as coding assistant to AI as autonomous agent raises the stakes for governance and control mechanisms.

Investment and engineering capacity are focused on production-grade, orchestrated agents: systems that can be governed, monitored, secured, and integrated at scale. Leaders are converging on platform standards that consistently manage identity and permissions, data access, tool catalogues, policy enforcement, and observability.

The multi-agent coordination challenge introduces new governance requirements. When multiple AI agents collaborate on complex tasks, the potential for emergent behaviour that violates architectural constraints increases. The mechanisms that work for single AI assistants may prove insufficient for agent swarms.

By 2030, CIOs forecast that 75% of IT work will involve human-AI collaboration, with 25% being fully autonomous AI tasks. Software engineering will be less about writing code and more about orchestrating intelligent systems. Engineers who adapt to these changes, embracing AI collaboration whilst maintaining quality discipline, will thrive.

The Control Imperative

The question is not whether AI will transform software development. It already has. GitHub's latest Octoverse numbers show monthly code pushes climbed past 82 million, merged PRs reached 43 million, and 41% of new code originated from AI-assisted generation. AI adoption reached 84% of all developers.

The question is whether this transformation will create systems that remain maintainable, secure, and adaptable, or whether it will produce a generation of codebases that no one fully understands and no one can safely modify. The difference lies entirely in the structural controls that organisations implement.

Specification-driven development transforms AI from a source of unpredictable output variance into a reliable implementation tool by establishing constraints before generation begins. Deterministic guardrails ensure that probabilistic outputs meet deterministic requirements before reaching production. Tiered review processes scale human oversight by matching review intensity to risk level. Platform engineering distributes enforcement capability across the organisation rather than concentrating it in senior engineers.

These mechanisms are not optional refinements. They are the difference between AI that amplifies capability and AI that amplifies chaos. The organisations that treat them as infrastructure rather than aspiration will lead the next generation of software development. Those that do not will spend their futures paying down the technical debt that undisciplined AI adoption creates.

The tools are powerful. The velocity is real. The productivity gains are achievable. But only for organisations willing to pay the discipline premium that sustainable AI adoption demands.

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References and Sources

1. Stack Overflow, “2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey: AI Section” – https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
2. GitClear, “AI Copilot Code Quality: 2025 Data Suggests 4x Growth in Code Clones” – https://www.gitclear.com/ai_assistant_code_quality_2025_research
3. Google DORA, “State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025” – https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/
4. Faros AI, “DORA Report 2025 Key Takeaways” – https://www.faros.ai/blog/key-takeaways-from-the-dora-report-2025
5. Qodo, “State of AI Code Quality in 2025” – https://www.qodo.ai/reports/state-of-ai-code-quality/
6. Qodo, “AI Code Review Tools Compared: Context, Automation, and Enterprise Scale” – https://www.qodo.ai/blog/best-ai-code-review-tools-2026/
7. Microsoft, “Enhancing Code Quality at Scale with AI-Powered Code Reviews” – https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/enhancing-code-quality-at-scale-with-ai-powered-code-reviews/
8. Thoughtworks, “Spec-driven development: Unpacking one of 2025's key new AI-assisted engineering practices” – https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/insights/blog/agile-engineering-practices/spec-driven-development-unpacking-2025-new-engineering-practices
9. GitHub Blog, “Spec-driven development with AI: Get started with a new open source toolkit” – https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-with-ai-get-started-with-a-new-open-source-toolkit/
10. Red Hat Developer, “How spec-driven development improves AI coding quality” – https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/10/22/how-spec-driven-development-improves-ai-coding-quality
11. Tech Hub MS, “Deterministic Guardrails for AI-Generated Code: Why Observability and Smarter Linters Matter” – https://tech.hub.ms/2025-11-18-Deterministic-Guardrails-for-AI-Generated-Code-Why-Observability-and-Smarter-Linters-Matter.html
12. Tessl, “Tessl launches spec-driven development tools for reliable AI coding agents” – https://tessl.io/blog/tessl-launches-spec-driven-framework-and-registry/
13. CodeScene, “AI Code Guardrails: Validate and Quality-Gate GenAI Code” – https://codescene.com/resources/use-cases/prevent-ai-generated-technical-debt
14. InfoQ, “AI-Generated Code Creates New Wave of Technical Debt, Report Finds” – https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/11/ai-code-technical-debt/
15. Ox Security, “Army of Juniors: The AI Code Security Crisis” – Referenced via InfoQ
16. KPMG, “AI at Scale: How 2025 Set the Stage for Agent-Driven Enterprise Reinvention in 2026” – https://kpmg.com/us/en/media/news/q4-ai-pulse.html
17. McKinsey, “The agentic organization: Contours of the next paradigm for the AI era” – https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-agentic-organization-contours-of-the-next-paradigm-for-the-ai-era
18. Orrick, “The EU AI Act: 6 Steps to Take Before 2 August 2026” – https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/2025/11/The-EU-AI-Act-6-Steps-to-Take-Before-2-August-2026
19. IT Revolution, “AI's Mirror Effect: How the 2025 DORA Report Reveals Your Organization's True Capabilities” – https://itrevolution.com/articles/ais-mirror-effect-how-the-2025-dora-report-reveals-your-organizations-true-capabilities/
20. TechCrunch, “A quarter of startups in YC's current cohort have codebases that are almost entirely AI-generated” – https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/a-quarter-of-startups-in-ycs-current-cohort-have-codebases-that-are-almost-entirely-ai-generated/
21. Wikipedia, “Vibe coding” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
22. HackerNoon, “The Vibe Coding Hangover: What Happens When AI Writes 95% of your code?” – https://hackernoon.com/the-vibe-coding-hangover-what-happens-when-ai-writes-95percent-of-your-code
23. Digital Applied, “AI Code Review Automation: Complete Guide 2025” – https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-code-review-automation-guide-2025
24. Dev Tools Academy, “State of AI Code Review Tools in 2025” – https://www.devtoolsacademy.com/blog/state-of-ai-code-review-tools-2025/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

The Fediverse Of Football? Could such a thing exist?

With all the news going on currently and how it is tying back to “The Shield” in the worst ways imaginable, maybe instead of just one league we have regional leagues all on equal footing where the league champs advance to a playoff to see who the champion of them all. I mean, why not right? The Bowl of Bowls so to speak. It'd be fun, exciting, and add a flavor to professional sports that we don't currently have on this side of the proverbial pond.

Also, by decentralizing the power structure to that degree, you don't have one body rule over everything because if one governing body has too much power and the wrong people rise to the top of said governing body, bad things happen. It's literally the history of sports organizations around the world. NFL, FIFA, PGA, IOC, you name the sport and the organization, there have been some shenanigans with unruly people at the top doing bad things. Single ownership models of several regional leagues who are linked together through some sort of football confederation and that confederation has a playoff to determine the champion of champions? By making said leagues regional you'd lower travel costs. You could theoretically buy buses and make most travel some sort of bus trip instead of buying plane tickets over and over again for cross-country flights and such. There are definitely advantages to this idea, just some details would need to be flushed out to make this a fully functional business proposal of sorts.

However many leagues and teams per league (all leagues in such an arrangement would need the same number of teams) is something that'd have to be determined. The opportunity is definitely there with the appropriate resources (which I currently do not have, full disclosure). Getting funding, distribution, what have you would be discussions for another time. The A7FL is the league that operates most closely to this vision I am writing about here, but they have “league owners” and a more vertical power structure than I am envisioning. The leagues should be the true power centers here, not the overarching body.

What if the “Brand New Shield” isn't just one organization but multiple organizations who operate on the same platform and use a more decentralized, confederated model than most professional sports? It's definitely an interesting idea to think about and something that is definitely going to be written about more on this blog.

In Summary: * It was great, listening to the Indiana Hoosiers women's basketball team win their first Big Ten game of the season this afternoon. Hope this win will be followed by many more. It was also great seeing Caitlin Clark hosting on the NBA on NBC preshow this evening. She did a pretty good job, in my humble opinion.

Prayers, etc.: *I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.1 lbs. * bp= 138/83 (61)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 08:15 – crackers and cheese * 11:20 – little sausages, fried rice, fried egg * 15:00 – meat loaf

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 06:40 – bank accounts activity monitored * 06:45 – read, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials * 12:30 – listening to the pregame show ahead of this afternoon's women's college basketball game between Northwestern and IU * 15:00 – and the Hoosiers win 89 to 73. * 15:30 – watch the Millrose Track and Field Competition * 17:00 – watch the NBA on NBC * 18:00 – listening to relaxing music

Chess: * 14:50 – moved in all pending CC games

1. The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) by Ursula K. Le Guin, 364p: This is a classic sci-fi book that doesn't hold your hand at the beginning, with lots of world building terms being mentioned without too much explanation. But the world is rich, and eventually we understand pieces of it by reading further and making our own connections. This was not a plot heavy book for me, it shines on character building. It explores the clash between two different societies, one which is traditional gender binary and another (the Gethenians) which is essentially genderless and sexless, except during a mating season. It was a slow read for me, but it pays off when the two main characters have to team up and go on a long journey, trekking a cold and snowed-in landscape together. It is a great though-experiment on gender, cultural oppression and colonization. Having been written in the 60s, this book paved the way for future sci-fi gender conversations by daring to imagine a world where gender isn’t a constant and can be fluid, contextual, and socially constructed.

2. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow [audio] 10h17min: This book lays down all the foundation and reasoning behind the phenomenon that is the systematic decay of services everywhere. The author coined the term “Enshittification”, and he presents various examples of the mechanism happening in services like Meta, Amazon, Uber, etc. I enjoyed the audio version, narrated by the author himself. Cory Doctorow uses sarcasm and he is often funny. But at the same time, the sad reality of capitalism exploitation is distilled in great detail. There is also a final section where he offers solutions. Very informative and timely read in our current moment (I read it in early 2026). After finishing it, it’s hard not to notice enshittification everywhere.

3. Winterfair Gifts (Vorkosigan Saga #13.5) by Lois McMaster Bujold, 90p: A nice novella where we can see Miles and Ekaterin's wedding! But we actually see it through the eyes of Roic, a Vorkosigan House guardsman who we met in the previous book, A Civil Campaign. We also get a chance to see Sergeant Taura again, which was great in this story. There's a bit of a mystery, but nothing complex.

4. A Week to Be Wicked (Spindle Cove #2) by Tessa Dare, 384p: The first time I tried this book, I didn’t like either of the characters from the first scene. I gave this book a second chance, and it was okay. The trope is the smart, bookish girl (Minerva) who really doesn't want to get married because she wants to be a geologist and the unrepentant rake (Colin). It's a road trip novel, with the two faking an elopement so that Minerva can travel to Scotland and present her findings in a Royal Geological Society Symposium. It's a light, funny read.

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#readinglist #books #reading

Dieses Hörspiel ist eine meiner absoluten Lieblingsgeschichten. Seit meiner Jugend habe ich es mir unzählige Male angehört. Eine grossartige Vertonung einer grossartigen Geschichte.

Zur Geschichte

Baudolino erzählt die Geschichte eines Bauernjungen aus dem Piemont, der von Barbarossa, seines Zeichens Kaiser des Heiligen Römischen Reichs, adoptiert wird.

Fokus der ersten Hälfte sind Barbarossa und dessen Italienfeldzüge. Dabei wird die Gestalt des Baudolino immer dort zugezogen, wo die Geschichtsschreibung Lücken aufweist. Zahlreiche bis heute ungeklärte Ereignisse und Umstände werden ihm zugeschrieben. Dabei zeigt der Autor viel Humor, vermittelt zugleich aber auch Wissen über Oberitalien und dessen Geschichte.

In der zweiten Hälfte der Geschichte begibt sich Baudolino auf eine Reise in den Osten. Dieser Teil ist vom Stil her wohl an Mittelalterliche Reiseberichte zweifelhafter Herkunft angelehnt. Solche Berichte werden im Buch auch thematisiert und als oft unzuverlässig oder gar erfunden abgetan.

Tatsächlich werden die Erzählungen von Baudolino immer fantastischer und unglaubwürdiger. Haben seine Ausführungen zu beginn der Geschichte noch plausibel und glaubhaft geklungen, so untergräbt dieser zweite Teil seine Glaubwürdigkeit als Erzähler und als Hörer müssen wir uns fragen, ob und wie weit ihm zu trauen ist.

Die Vertonung

Der Südwestrundfunk (SWR), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) und der Hörverlag haben eine wunderbare, aufwändig produzierte, Hörspielfassung des Buches von Umberto Eco geschaffen.

Diese beseitigt eines der grossen Hürden aller Umerto Eco Romane, nämlich, dass es sehr schwierig sein kann der Geschichte zu folgen. Durch akustisches Hinterlegen der verschiedenen Schauplätze und Zeitlinien der Geschichte, ist das in dem Hörspiel aber deutlich vereinfacht. Man kann der Geschichte sogar folgen, ohne ihr andauernd die volle Aufmerksamkeit schenken zu müssen.

Die Stimmen, Musik und Geräusche sind alle hervorragend gemacht, gut vertont und abgemischt. Auch nach unzähligen Durchgängen, freue ich mich jedes Mal wieder aufs neue, das Hörbuch noch einmal zu hören.

Für wen ist es?

Alle, die sich für Geschichte, insbesondere das Europa des Mittelalters interessieren, sollten auf jeden Fall rein hören.

Abgesehen davon, ist es einfach ein toll gemachtes Hörspiel das viel Freude bereitet beim Zuhören, insofern eigentlich allen zu empfehlen.

https://www.audible.de/pd/Baudolino-Hoerbuch/B009CYINE0

Mark 15 is often read quickly because it feels so familiar. We know the outline. We know the ending. We know the cross. But when you slow down and let this chapter breathe, something unsettling happens. You realize this is not simply a story about death. It is a story about exposure. It is the moment when power is unmasked, when cruelty becomes ordinary, when fear pretends to be justice, and when love refuses to defend itself. This chapter is not written like poetry. It is written like a record. And that is exactly why it hurts.

Jesus does not enter Mark 15 as a hero. He enters it as a problem. He is inconvenient to the religious system. He is dangerous to political stability. He is uncomfortable to people who would rather preserve order than confront truth. So He is handed from one authority to another like a piece of evidence no one wants responsibility for. The trial before Pilate is not about guilt or innocence. It is about liability. Pilate knows Jesus has done nothing deserving death. The crowd knows it too. But knowledge is not the same thing as courage. And courage is what this chapter keeps asking for and never receiving from the powerful.

Pilate stands in front of the Son of God and asks Him a political question. “Art thou the King of the Jews?” It sounds religious, but it is really about control. Kings threaten empires. Titles create fear. Jesus answers simply, “Thou sayest it.” He does not deny it, but He does not fight for it either. His silence is not weakness. It is intention. He will not prove Himself through spectacle. He will not beg to be spared. He will not manipulate sympathy. He stands there as truth and lets lies expose themselves.

The crowd is given a choice. Barabbas or Jesus. A known criminal or a man who healed the sick. A rebel who shed blood or a teacher who gave life. And the crowd chooses Barabbas. This moment is not about their ignorance. It is about their fear. Barabbas represents violent change. Jesus represents moral change. One promises revenge. The other demands repentance. The crowd chooses the one that feels powerful rather than the one that feels true. That choice echoes across history. Every generation chooses between the comfort of rage and the discomfort of transformation.

Pilate washes his hands of the decision, but washing your hands does not make you innocent. It only means you did not want to feel responsible. He gives the order for Jesus to be scourged and crucified, and then the soldiers take over. What happens next is not judicial. It is recreational. They dress Jesus in purple. They twist a crown of thorns. They mock Him as king. They strike Him. They kneel in false worship. This is not about discipline. It is about humiliation. The cruelty is intentional. They are not trying to kill Him yet. They are trying to erase His dignity first.

There is something disturbing about how normal this feels to them. No one stops it. No one questions it. It is just another prisoner, another execution, another day of work. This is what unchecked power looks like when it gets bored. The chapter does not dramatize this moment. It reports it. And that is what makes it so heavy. Evil rarely announces itself. It usually clocks in and does its job.

When they lead Jesus out to be crucified, He is too weak to carry His own cross. A man named Simon of Cyrene is forced to carry it for Him. Simon does not volunteer. He is compelled. And yet his name is recorded forever. This is one of the strange patterns of Scripture. The people who do not choose the burden often end up being shaped by it the most. Simon did not wake up that day planning to touch the cross. But once he did, his life was never the same. Sometimes the holiest moments arrive uninvited.

At Golgotha, they offer Jesus wine mixed with myrrh, a crude anesthetic. He refuses it. This is not because He wants pain. It is because He intends to be present. He will not dull what must be faced. He will not escape what must be carried. He will experience the weight of human suffering without retreat. Then they crucify Him. Mark does not describe the nails. He does not describe the blood. He does not describe the agony. He simply says, “And they crucified him.” The simplicity of the sentence is devastating. It is as if language itself refuses to linger.

Above His head they place the charge: “The King of the Jews.” It is meant to mock Him. It ends up proclaiming Him. Two thieves are crucified with Him, one on either side. The Scripture is fulfilled that He is numbered with the transgressors. He is not between saints. He is between criminals. This is not an accident. It is a statement. He dies where broken people die. He hangs where society discards what it does not want to deal with. He enters death in the company of guilt so that guilt will never be alone again.

The crowd mocks Him. The religious leaders mock Him. Even those crucified with Him mock Him. “Save thyself, and come down from the cross.” They believe power means escape. They believe victory means avoidance. They think if He were truly who He claimed to be, He would refuse the suffering. They do not understand that the suffering is the mission. He is not proving He is God by coming down. He is proving He is love by staying up.

Then something happens that cannot be explained by politics or psychology. At the sixth hour, darkness covers the land. The sun refuses to cooperate with the execution. Creation itself responds to what humanity is doing. The light withdraws. Time feels suspended. And Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is not doubt. It is quotation. He is speaking Psalm 22. He is not abandoning faith. He is entering the deepest language of lament. He is expressing what it feels like to carry the weight of separation. Not from God’s presence, but from God’s comfort.

This moment is where theology becomes personal. This is where salvation stops being abstract and becomes relational. Jesus is not simply dying. He is experiencing the distance that sin creates. He is tasting the isolation that rebellion produces. He is standing in the emotional territory of every human who has ever felt abandoned by heaven. And He does it without running.

Some think He is calling for Elijah. Others misunderstand Him. This is another pattern. Pain is rarely interpreted correctly by spectators. When someone is suffering deeply, the crowd often mislabels it. They turn agony into drama. They turn prayer into spectacle. They turn grief into rumor. Jesus’ final moments are surrounded by misunderstanding. And yet He continues.

When He breathes His last, the veil of the temple is torn in two from top to bottom. This is not a coincidence. The veil separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple. It represented distance between God and humanity. And now it is torn. Not from the bottom up, as if by human effort, but from the top down, as if by divine action. God is not waiting to be reached. He is stepping out.

And then comes one of the quietest and most important lines in the chapter. A Roman centurion, a man whose job is execution, looks at Jesus and says, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” The first person to publicly confess Jesus as God in Mark’s Gospel is not a disciple. It is not a priest. It is not a prophet. It is a soldier who just watched Him die. This is what the cross does. It reveals God in places no one expects.

The women watch from a distance. They have followed Him. They have supported Him. They have stayed. While most of the disciples fled, the women remain. They do not rescue Him. They do not argue with the soldiers. They simply witness. Faith does not always look like action. Sometimes it looks like presence. They are there when the sky goes dark. They are there when He breathes His last. They are there when the crowd leaves. They do not turn away from the ending.

Joseph of Arimathea steps forward and asks Pilate for the body. This is an act of courage. To be associated with Jesus now is dangerous. The movement looks finished. The man looks defeated. And yet Joseph chooses dignity over safety. He wraps Jesus in linen and places Him in a tomb. The stone is rolled into place. The story appears closed.

Mark 15 ends without triumph. It ends with silence. The King is dead. The disciples are scattered. The crowd has gone home. The religious leaders think the problem is solved. And the women mark the location of the grave.

This chapter is not written to make us admire Jesus from a distance. It is written to expose us. We see ourselves in Pilate when we avoid responsibility. We see ourselves in the crowd when we choose what feels powerful over what is right. We see ourselves in the soldiers when cruelty becomes routine. We see ourselves in the mockers when we demand proof instead of surrender. And if we are honest, we also see ourselves in the women who stay but do not yet understand.

Mark 15 is not asking if Jesus can die. It is asking why we wanted Him to. It is asking what kind of world kills healers and frees criminals. It is asking what happens when truth threatens comfort. It is asking how far love is willing to go to reach those who run from it.

The cross is not God’s response to human failure. It is God’s response to human fear. Fear of losing control. Fear of admitting guilt. Fear of being changed. Jesus does not die because Rome is strong. He dies because humanity is afraid.

And yet in that fear, something holy happens. God does not answer violence with violence. He does not answer accusation with defense. He does not answer mockery with fire. He answers it with endurance. He answers it with forgiveness. He answers it with presence.

This is why the cross still matters. It is not a symbol of suffering alone. It is a mirror. It shows us who we are when threatened. It shows us who God is when rejected. It shows us what love looks like when it has no leverage.

We like resurrection. We like victory. We like open tombs and angelic announcements. But Mark 15 reminds us that before hope, there is honesty. Before dawn, there is darkness. Before new life, there is the courage to face death without pretending it is not real.

Jesus does not escape Mark 15. He enters it. He walks through it. He carries the weight of human cruelty and human confusion and human sin without becoming cruel, confused, or sinful Himself. He lets the worst of us do its worst to Him so that the best of God can be shown to us.

And the most unsettling truth is this. If Jesus had come down from the cross, the crowd would have believed in His power. But because He stayed, the centurion believed in His identity. Power impresses. Love convinces.

Mark 15 is the chapter where God refuses to save Himself so that He can save us. It is the day the sky darkened. It is the hour the veil tore. It is the moment death thought it had won and did not yet know it had lost.

This is not the end of the story. But it is the price of the next chapter.

Mark 15 does not close with thunder or angels. It closes with a sealed stone and watched silence. That is intentional. The Gospel refuses to rush us past the cost. It leaves us sitting in the unresolved space where faith feels most fragile. The Messiah is dead. The promises look broken. The movement looks finished. And yet this is the exact place where God does His deepest work—where certainty collapses and trust must decide whether it will still breathe.

What makes this chapter so uncomfortable is that it does not allow us to hide behind distance. We are not told about “them.” We are shown “us.” Pilate is not an ancient villain; he is the modern instinct to avoid conflict. The crowd is not an ancient mob; it is the voice of public opinion when it becomes louder than conscience. The soldiers are not ancient brutes; they are what happens when suffering becomes procedural. The mockers are not ancient skeptics; they are the reflex to demand spectacle instead of submission. Mark 15 is not history alone. It is diagnosis.

The strange thing is that Jesus never once defends Himself. He answers when asked directly, but He does not argue. He does not plead. He does not try to shift blame. He does not rehearse miracles. He does not summon angels. He does not threaten Rome. He does not scold the priests. He allows the lie to finish speaking. That silence is not surrender. It is authority. It says that truth does not need to shout. It says that love does not need to prove itself through domination. It says that God will win without becoming what He is saving us from.

When Jesus is mocked as king, the irony is unbearable. They dress Him in purple. They crown Him with thorns. They bow in false homage. They strike Him. They laugh. They believe they are humiliating Him. In reality, they are revealing Him. Kings of this world wear gold and rule by fear. This King wears pain and rules by sacrifice. His throne is wood. His crown is thorns. His scepter is endurance. And His kingdom does not arrive by conquest but by consent. He does not take power from humanity. He gives Himself to it.

There is a moment in this chapter that is easy to miss but spiritually enormous. Jesus refuses the wine mixed with myrrh. He does not numb Himself. He does not anesthetize the pain. He remains awake to it. He remains present inside it. He chooses consciousness over comfort. This is what love looks like when it commits. It does not dull the cost. It carries it. It does not avoid suffering. It enters it. He will not float above human agony. He will inhabit it.

When they crucify Him, Mark does not describe the mechanics. There is no gore. No graphic detail. No emotional manipulation. Just the sentence. “And they crucified him.” That restraint is devastating. It forces the reader to supply the weight. It refuses to turn suffering into spectacle. It preserves dignity even in death. Scripture does not need to exaggerate pain to make it holy. The holiness is in the obedience.

The title above His head is meant to mock, but it becomes proclamation. “The King of the Jews.” Rome means it as ridicule. Heaven receives it as truth. The charge is political. The reality is eternal. Jesus is not executed for murder or theft. He is executed for identity. The accusation is not what He did. It is who He is. This is why His death is not merely tragic. It is revelatory. It shows what happens when divine truth stands in human systems built on fear.

He is crucified between criminals. This is not poetic accident. It is theological intention. He does not die among the innocent. He dies among the guilty. He does not distance Himself from sin. He places Himself inside its consequences. He is not merely sympathizing with sinners. He is standing where they stand. He is not saving humanity from above. He is saving it from within.

The mockers demand that He save Himself. They believe rescue equals legitimacy. They believe survival equals authority. But Jesus reveals a different logic. If He saves Himself, He abandons us. If He escapes the cross, He leaves sin untouched. If He avoids death, He avoids redemption. The power of God is not shown by escape. It is shown by endurance. The cross is not the failure of Jesus’ mission. It is the fulfillment of it.

Then the sky darkens. This is not weather. This is witness. Creation reacts to the death of its Creator. The sun withdraws. Light hides. The world pauses. It is as if the universe refuses to proceed as normal while God is being executed by His own creation. Darkness is not just absence here. It is grief.

Jesus’ cry is not a breakdown of faith. It is a declaration of solidarity with the abandoned. He does not say, “I no longer believe.” He says, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” This is not disbelief. It is lament. It is the language of trust under strain. He is not questioning God’s existence. He is expressing the human experience of distance. He is speaking the words that millions of broken people have spoken in their darkest hours. And by speaking them, He sanctifies them. Prayer is not always praise. Sometimes it is pain with God’s name still attached to it.

The misunderstanding continues even here. Some think He is calling Elijah. They do not hear Him clearly. Pain distorts perception. People project myths onto suffering. They interpret agony as drama. But Jesus’ cry is not for rescue. It is the final bearing of separation so that separation can end.

When He dies, the veil tears. This is the quiet earthquake of the chapter. The barrier between God and humanity is ripped open. Access is no longer restricted. Presence is no longer hidden. God does not stay behind the curtain while humanity bleeds. He steps into exposure. He opens the way not by invitation but by destruction of the wall.

And then the centurion speaks. He has seen death before. He has watched bodies collapse. He has supervised executions. This is not new to him. But this death is different. This silence is different. This endurance is different. And he names it. “Truly this man was the Son of God.” The first human to say it openly is not a disciple. It is an executioner. That is the power of the cross. It convinces enemies. It awakens strangers. It reaches across professions, politics, and prejudices.

The women remain. They watch. They do not flee. They do not shout. They do not intervene. They witness. In a world that worships action, this is quiet courage. They stay with the dying when others run from the danger. They hold the place of memory. They become the keepers of the ending so they can become the witnesses of the beginning. Their faith does not look like solutions. It looks like loyalty.

Joseph of Arimathea steps out of secrecy. Until now, he has been a hidden follower. Now he risks association. He asks for the body. He provides a tomb. He honors a condemned man when it is no longer useful to do so. This is the cost of late courage. It arrives when applause is gone. It appears when risk remains but reward is unclear. Joseph’s faith shows up after death, not before it. And God receives it.

The stone is rolled in place. The chapter closes. There is no miracle yet. There is no angel yet. There is no triumph yet. There is only the sealed silence of a tomb.

This is where Mark 15 leaves us. With the cost visible and the outcome hidden.

And this is where our own faith often lives. Between promise and proof. Between confession and confirmation. Between what God has said and what we can see. We want Mark 16 without sitting inside Mark 15. We want resurrection without crucifixion. We want victory without surrender. But the Gospel does not allow that shortcut.

The cross is not just something Jesus endured. It is something we must understand. It shows us what sin looks like when it meets love. It shows us what power looks like when it refuses to dominate. It shows us what God is willing to endure to remain God while saving humanity.

Mark 15 does not present Jesus as a tragic hero. It presents Him as a faithful servant. He does not die because He is overwhelmed. He dies because He is obedient. He does not lose control. He gives it. He does not get trapped. He chooses to stay.

The greatest misunderstanding about the cross is that it is God’s reaction to sin. It is not. It is God’s decision about relationship. Sin could have been punished from a distance. Humanity could have been abandoned. Justice could have been executed without incarnation. But God chose presence. He chose proximity. He chose vulnerability. He chose to let the cost be personal.

This is why the cross is not just a religious symbol. It is a relational one. It says God does not love humanity from safety. He loves humanity from inside suffering. He does not shout forgiveness from heaven. He bleeds it on earth.

Mark 15 shows us that God is not impressed by power displays. He is revealed by sacrificial endurance. He is not recognized by crowds. He is confessed by those who see Him die without hate. The centurion sees it. The women know it. Joseph honors it. And heaven records it.

We often ask where God is when things fall apart. Mark 15 answers that question with a cross. He is there. Silent. Bleeding. Staying.

The world thought it ended a movement. It sealed a tomb. It went home satisfied. It did not realize it had only closed a door long enough for God to work unseen. Resurrection requires burial. New life requires letting go. Victory requires passing through defeat without surrendering to it.

Mark 15 is the chapter where love does not flinch. Where truth does not retreat. Where God does not abandon humanity even when humanity abandons Him.

It is the chapter that proves salvation is not an idea. It is a cost.

And that cost was paid without complaint.

Not because God enjoys suffering.

But because God refuses to leave us alone inside it.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Charlie's Cafe Exceptionale was a fixture in Minneapolis for most of its nearly fifty years. It was a favorite of my mom's, and she remembered the potato salad most of her life. I found the recipe for their potato salad on the web some time in 2005 (which is about when that recipe page disappeared from the web) and made a copy of it for myself. Shortly thereafter I made a batch of the potato salad for tailgating at a St. Paul Saints game, and took some to my mom the next day. She proclaimed it, “pretty darned close!”

The menu at Charlie's listed the potato salad as an appetizer, rather than as a side. For many people, the potato salad was the reason for their visit, though mom said that it went well with their small roast-beef sandwiches, which were roasted beef tenderloin with onions cooked just short of caramelized on the grill, topped with a dollop of horseradish sauce and served on a soft roll.

Here's the story of the recipe from the original web-page:

The true story of this recipe is that it came to my mother, who got it from her friend Candy who once dated the chef at Charlie's restaurant. Now you have to know, Candy was a knock-out back in the day. She was a hat model and entertained with celebrities who came through Minneapolis. She was, and is a hell of a lot of fun. Charlie's Cafe potato salad recipe was a closely guarded secret and several recipes exist out there; but this one is the real thing. You can check with a local author, who has just published a book on minneapolis restaurants and you'll find her version of the recipe at the StarTribune site. But folks who have had Candy's recipe and the origional as served at Charlie's, say they recognize the taste as authentic. And who's recipe are you going to believe? As mother says, "That chef was going to give out the real recipe for a piece of ass."

Tags: #música

NB Parker me tiró la caña esta vez y a mi MARO me gusta mucho desde antes incluso de sacar su primer disco…

Este es el último que ha publicado. Hay en el mundo muchos discos de duelo por una pérdida sentimental. Muy pocos como este. Maro es una mujer muy lista además de talentosa. El otro día decía yo que el amor romántico es la negación del amor y por eso es tan deprimente.

No hace tanto me decía el Príncipe negro que a él le parecía incomprensible mi postura de preferir a alguien que me importa feliz sin mi que mal o aburrido conmigo. La clave, creo, está en querer a la gente. Que te importen. Quererlas por lo que son como seres humanos y no como piezas en tu puzzle.

Maro esto lo entiende perfectamente. Esta relación terminará cuando seamos amigos, canta. Otra cosa que pasa con ciertos terapeutas fake de tiktok es que plantean el contacto cero como una forma de castigo, tortura o prueba de fortaleza, dependiendo de la corriente que manejen.

El contacto cero es el espacio de tiempo que necesitas para sanar y decidir qué relación quieres tener con la otra persona. Ella contigo. Y si eso encaja de alguna forma.

Es muy difícil que esto funcione en las lógicas del presunto amor presuntamente romántico. Es muy difícil que ese tiempo sin contacto deje de considerarse un rearme. Una trégua entre batallas.

Pero Maro es una mujer muy lista. Construyó otra cosa desde otro sitio. Algo que ya no funciona. Que hay que volver a reconstruir. Duele. Claro que duele.

Te metes en tu burbuja a cantar bajito. A entender por qué no funciona. Qué se rompió. Qué queda entero.

Te metes en tu burbuja a hacer tu parte confiando en que al otro lado haya alguien jugando limpio. Pero sabiendo en el fondo que da igual lo sucio que juegue. Porque tu juego limpio es suficiente para hacer la cicatriz. La tuya. La que cura la herida por la que podrías desangrarte. Y nadie puede curar heridas ajenas.

Maro susurra verdades como puños. Las incómodas y las otras. En las rupturas siempre están las dos. Tampoco funciona fingir que no hay nada bueno. Que nunca lo hubo.

Maro susurra mientras florece. Unas percusiones con sabor caboverdiano. Unas segundas voces como un eco en tu cabeza que también suenan a música morna.

It aint over es, con mucha diferencia, la mejor canción de un disco lleno de canciones preciosas, auténticas. It aint over no existiría sin el proceso de escribir las demás. Aunque esté justo en medio del disco es el final de un camino. Pero también el principio de otro.

Es esperanzador escucharla. Pensar que alguien en el mundo ha elegido entenderse, entender a quien quiere. Aceptar la realidad. Cuidar ese amor hasta las últimas consecuencias. Cuidarlo para que solo pueda matarlo su destinatario. Es una forma de justicia poética involuntaria estar en el mundo, hacer música, habiendo entendido tan bien qué te hace ser feliz. Ser capaz de hacer felices a otras personas.

Algunas cosas tienen que acabar para que muchas otras comiencen. Perder es negarte lo que sientes. Negarte la posibilidad de sentirlo. Maro ha hecho un disco donde todo late. Sabe perfectamente qué está haciendo. Hay una luz deslumbrante que se va encendiendo a medida que las canciones avanzan. Unas baterías que los guardianes del canon llaman pop porque están en un disco de una chavala. Pues ok. Pop. Sea. Lo que sea. Escuchad a Maro mientras vivís. Y todo estará al menos un poco mejor.