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