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Navigating the Fog of War: Age of Empires, AI Agents, and the Rise of Dark Code

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This was a 1 hour round-table discussion with CTOs from Canada ( TrueNorthCTO ) on May 6th 2026. I gave the main talk and during certain parts we went into discussion mode. It was a lot of fun and afterwards there was plenty of discussion on their Slack channel, or so I heard, I'm not on there as I'm not a Canadian CTO ;) Welcome, everyone. Today, we’re going to talk about "dark code," the value of system visibility, and what a classic real-time strategy game can teach us about managing modern software organizations. We’re living in one of the wildest eras of technology shifting under our feet, and as technology leaders, we need a new mental model to survive it. To give you a bit of context, I'm 38 years old and have spent my career navigating different software paradigms. I spent seven years at Mendix, a low-code platform pioneer, which started in the Netherlands and then moved it's HQ to Boston. After that, I became the CTO of an online eye-testing medical d...
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Three Thoughts on Dark Code

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A couple of weeks ago Dan Shapiro's blog post " The 5 Levels"  (about Agentic Engineering) did the rounds. He coined Level 5 the "Dark Software Factory". So what comes out of those factories? I'm calling it Dark Code. Dark Code : lines of software that no human has written, read or even reviewed. Two weeks ago I presented a talk " Mapping out Dark Code " at the OpenAI Codex meetup in Amsterdam, and now people start conversations with me and mention Dark Code. So before this goes out of control, let me write some thoughts. Tldr: Will my codebase become an unholy mess if no one looks at the code?: Yes, this is an unsolved problem. Will there be new programming languages if humans don't care about code anymore?: Doubtful, and that's a shame! Dark Code is already here: In enterprises no one knows the code anyways. 1 - Will my codebase become an unholy mess if no one looks at the code? Agents take prompts and implement this in your codebase. I s...
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Mapping out Dark Code

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This is a 30 minute talk I gave at the very first OpenAI Codex Meetup in Amsterdam on March 5th 2026. I introduced the concept of Dark Code . It was a lot of fun and the audience seemed to like it. My CMO gave me a 7-8 out of 10.  This is not an exact representation of the talk, I improvised, went off-script and forgot things. Also the organizers told me to say the f-word less (4 is bad, 1 would be OK), so in this transcript I've redacted it. At least if you say the f-word, you're quite sure it's not AI-slop ;) Hi, I'm Jouke and today I'm going to talk to you about Mapping out Dark Code. This is the very first Codex meetup here in Amsterdam, this is the very first presentation of the evening and it's also a first time we're showing Comper to a real-world audience. Lots of firsts. We're happy to be here! [the sentences appeared one by one, I do that all the time to make sure people follow my train of thought, and don't try to read everything at once] ...
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