genox.ch
About
September 19, 2026

Some thoughts on AI, mainly the coding agent side of things

Been thinking a lot lately and need to write things down. Agentic coding, in essence I have been using code agents for all my side projects for roughly the past 18 months and it has completely changed the way I think about programming. Granted, my setup is elaborate and far from just running a prompt in something like Claude or ChatGPT online. And it evolved at incredible speed, roughly 6 completely different approaches, with some side quests. Agentic coding is NOT getting a subscription, downloading a CLI tool and off you go. The output will not be what you want it to be. I tuned my entire workflow to accommodate agentic coding, from eslint rules to symbol mappers to wiki-like knowledge bases with pitfalls and patterns. I have to admit, I always liked programming for the sake of fleshing out a vision or a requirement. To me, it is a tool, a way to manifest my own or a clients requirements in a software tool. I never liked programming for the sake of the programming itself, needlessly complex toolchains or other distractions. Frontend development especially is and has been a mess for as long as I can remember, that doesn’t help.. And there have been evangelists for one or the other way of doing something for as long as programming has existed. So nothing has changed and probably never will on that front. Right now I notice a lot of collective amnesia. I have to chuckle when I read that people blame LLM output for being wrong or introducing bugs. Like nobody ever introduced bugs? Like every piece of software written in the last 45 years is perfect? How threatened do we need to feel to completely block that out? The iterative process remains. We stand at the beginning of a new era. All previous attempts that tried to abstract the act of coding away from feature development pale in comparison to what is currently going on. And as a single person working on something, I can have 3 agents develop individual features or let them orchestrate to work on a fullstack feature. It is so much more efficient. Even if I have to nudge every single task to get it right to where I want it, it is still more efficient, because not only can I work on 3 tracks at the same time, but I also have the capacity on top of that to think about the big picture of whatever I want to achieve, without getting lost in technical details. I am not sure how to express this, but I think either you really try to get used to the workflow - find that flow, work with it and not against it, find your individual way for your individual requirements - or agentic coding is not your cup of tea and you go on doing it the way you are used to. To reach flow state, problem-solving remains the most prominent trigger for me. And that is still my job to a large extent. It just shifts a little bit. I do not see anything wrong with either agentic coding or sticking to the path. If you are the kind of programmer who can reminisce for hours on the beauty of algorithms, I am the last person who wants to take that away from you. I completely get it. I feel the same when I see my ideas coming together.
  • Yes, there is always a way to not do it, with every tool. That includes LLMs for coding.
  • Yes, your architecture will suck after running 24 agents for a week without a single review.
  • Yes, vague instructions don’t just confuse juniors or your coworkers, they also confuse agents.
Lean, mean, poor man's dream
February 21, 2026

Lean, mean, poor man's dream

I run about 20 services across 7 cloud VPS nodes, a dedicated mail server, local services including some Raspberry Pis, and an off-site machine connected via VPN. The whole thing costs roughly 50 EUR a month and is managed almost entirely by an AI agent that has never forgotten a lesson it learned. A lean, mean, poor man’s dream. This is what it looks like, why, what didn’t work, lessons learned, and what’s still rough around the edges.
Steroid Induced Hyper Productivity 2026InfrastructureDockerSelf-hostingDevOps
Not as planned
February 18, 2026

Not as planned

Plans can change. That’s fine. But oh boy, this one was a bit too much. What was supposed to be a relaxing holiday turned into quite the story. And the consequences will probably keep me busy for a while.
Note to selfWAIHAWTF
How aging changes your perspective
December 23, 2021

How aging changes your perspective

Turning 40. Things went by much quicker than I expected. Here’s an attempt to put into words what shifted along the way — what I gained, what I lost, and what I stopped caring about entirely.
Note to self
Why I don't like Angular
November 25, 2021

Why I don't like Angular

Funnily enough (or sadly, depends on your type of humour), in all the projects I worked on, the decision to go with Angular was rarely driven by hands-on frontend experience. It was usually made from a C-level perspective — prioritising perceived safety and enterprise credibility over developer ergonomics.
RantsFrontendAged like milk
What should have been
October 23, 2021

What should have been

I was involved in the R&D of NEEO right from the start. It was a good time — until it wasn’t. Since I left the company about two or three years in, I’ve often wondered what could have been if we had done things differently. This is a postmortem. And maybe a way for me to finally put this behind me.
Note to self
Hospital surfing
September 1, 2020

Hospital surfing

The docs tell me it’s directly related to the episode I had in spring, where I spent 2 weeks in hospital due to a hematolysis. Apparently, during a hematolysis, the liver works overtime to get rid of all the dead blood cells, thus creating a lot of waste material that is subsequently stored as gall in the gall bladder. The chemical composition is out of balance though, causing stones (salts) to form there in. If those stones decide to move, that’s when you start to feel pain.
Note to self
Hunting for a headless E-Commerce platform
June 20, 2020

Hunting for a headless E-Commerce platform

I’ve ran a few E-Commerce projects in the past. Mostly small business online stores using stacks like Drupal Commerce and other PHP based cart solutions. Things always got a bit tacky when trying to match the UI/UX of the cart solution to existing CMS based websites though. At some point, customisations just got too complicated and intrusive and - which is important in the segment I’m floating in - too costly: spending a lot of money to match two different platforms.
Note to selfDevelopment
Website frontpage firstload sizes in practice
May 19, 2020

Website frontpage firstload sizes in practice

There’s a new kind of minimalist movement sprouting, trying to make websites as small as possible. Well - “new” - taking into account, that their approach is basically to make websites like we used to make them in 2001 .. this can hardly be considered “new”. But anyways, I was trying to see how large a couple of mainstream websites are on their first pageload and how that translates into a rough estimate in terms of transferred assets and loading time.
Frontend
Shifting perspective
May 6, 2020

Shifting perspective

It feels quite surreal to look back. It’s been only a few months but with everything happening since, feels like a year. The world changed dramatically since.
How I ended up with Dokku and how to deploy Docker images with a GitLab pipeline
April 22, 2020

How I ended up with Dokku and how to deploy Docker images with a GitLab pipeline

About 2 years ago I started a bit of an odyssee to find a convenient, affordable and production ready way to deploy my web application stack. My goal was to make it viable by the above criteria, especially to have a stack/product in a segment that would normally end up on a shared webhost with clients that are used to shared webhosting pricing.
DevOps
First 3D printing experiments
April 20, 2020

First 3D printing experiments

Some prints turn out great, some fail completely and most aren’t really practically useful ;-). The key “fix” above is the only print we’ve made so far that actually has a functional aspect to it. I have to admit, most of the prints are just for fun. But it’s immensely satisfying to fix even a bloody mailbox key.
Tools
Genox is on Spotify
April 18, 2020

Genox is on Spotify

Roughly 2 months ago I noticed that one of the EPs I released on Enough Records showed up on Spotify. Turns out it was pushed to Spotify and YouTube via routenote.com on behalf of Enough. I got in touch with PS/Enough to find out more and we ended up putting together an Album made of two EPs, both of whom weren’t broadly publicly released. There’s no new tracks but I still find it funny to have my stuff visible on Spotify. :-)
Sonic Waves
Commento: a simple way to include comments
April 17, 2020

Commento: a simple way to include comments

I wanted to bring back comments for my blog articles for a while now. The downside of using a headless CMS is to some extent, that there are mostly no batteries included. Most headless systems are pretty unspecific and versatile, which is nice in so many ways. But pretty time consuming in others. I could have modelled a comment system on sanity.io, hooked up some endpoints on my Express and all of that jazz but decided against it. It just gets too complex, way too quickly. And I really don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel, once again.
ToolsBackend
Leaving Adobe software behind
April 7, 2020

Leaving Adobe software behind

I was using Adobe software since I first got a (cough not entirely legal cough) version of Photoshop about 20 years ago. When I started my own business, I bought licences for Creative Suite and switched over to the subscription model as soon as it was introduced. Since my daily business shifted to being very screen-centric and print became a side effect of sorts, I was tossing around the idea of quitting Adobe software for quite a while. Since my renewal was up by December 2019, I ended up cancelling. To be honest, it felt weird.
DesignTools
Roll your own GitLab CI runners
October 29, 2019

Roll your own GitLab CI runners

GitLab offers free shared runners (with a quota) to run your CI pipelines. This is extremeley generous and I’ve come to depend heavily on using them for my projects. Combined with their free tier, I don’t see a reason to not use GitLab. I haven’t paid a single dime for one year, things are stable and there’s only little down time on the shared runner pool.
DevOps
Tipping points
February 22, 2019

Tipping points

The climate. We love talking about it, don’t we. We can spend multiple news cycles analysing someone’s remarks about wether or not climate change is real, while we have proof right at our doorsteps. Or, lately, wether the situation is man-made or not. Seems like we accepted the fact that the bowl is broken after a decade of looking at it, falling down from the table in slow motion.
Rants
IE11 is the new IE6/7/8/9/10
August 30, 2018

IE11 is the new IE6/7/8/9/10

Well we are there again. Tons of features you’re dying to use but a certain platform, the one your client insists you absolutely HAVE to support (“the CEO is using IE11, so..”), does not support them. I have been playing this game since IE6 first got the heat and history is repeating itself in a strange fashion with the stuff coming from Redmond.
DevelopmentRants
Gitlab CI/CD with zeit.co's now
August 22, 2018

Gitlab CI/CD with zeit.co's now

Update: This article is no longer relevant. The NOW API referred to below is depcrecated and I’ve since moved on to running Dokku on a VPS.
DevOps
VSCode: The small pains
July 27, 2018

VSCode: The small pains

Visual Studio Code has come a long way since I first started to use it in early 2017. It’s fast and responsive, I can style it to my convenience (e.g. font sizes in the drawer etc). And it supports almost everything I need on a daily basis: TS, styled components, Angular, React, a bit of PHP now and then. But there’s some things that are tickling my nerves big time:
ToolsRants
Diving into React
September 30, 2017

Diving into React

I’ve had the opportunity to dive into React quite extensively for the past two months. Large project. Many, many components. Rather complicated setup on the backend, including a Python CMS which hydrates the SPA, in many different ways, including acting as a REST intermediary service for some other 3rd party APIs.
DevelopmentFrontend
The century of the self
April 17, 2017

The century of the self

“The evolution of psychology in marketing resulting in the Consumer Democracy.”
Documentary
The internet is different
February 11, 2017

The internet is different

Cleaning up my digital footprint allowed me to revisit a lot of services I have used in the past and basically just forgot about in the last 7-8 years. In the process, I realised how fragmented the internet is. How much content is there, outdated, sitting on a bleak corner of the web on a service that once thrived and has been superseded by “the next cool thing”?
Rants
rm -rf social_media*
February 6, 2017

rm -rf social_media*

I am going to delete all my social media accounts in the next few days. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth. Was thinking long and hard about this, but it’s the best way forward. I could just delete all the apps first, but hell, why bother. Time to cut the middle man and continuing defragmentation. Or to put it in more elaborate terms: bye bye bitches. Hehe.
Rants
War for the overworld
November 28, 2016

War for the overworld

This early access game was on sale on steam after I noticed that Dungeon Keeper 1 was for free on Origin. DK1 is great in so many ways, I played it for a few hours (320x240 or so, ugh) and decided to look around again for a “real spiritual successor”.
Gaming

Beyond this point, 145 hopelessly outdated posts gather dust.

Proceed at your own risk