POSTS DIRECTORY

A short follow-up to the OpenSCAD plugin post - quite a lot has landed since May.

Joovy is out - Apache 2.0, on GitHub.

The name is Julia + Groovy. Groovy gave Java a dynamic layer without leaving the JVM. Joovy does the same for Julia.

A quick one: Flexible Haskell.

Haskell tooling in JetBrains IDEs has been in a strange place for years. There are a few plugins around, and most of them are either abandoned or stuck. So we wrote one.

Next up: Flexible Elixir.

We built this one for our own production Elixir projects, which is usually the right reason to build a thing.

So this is an unofficial one: Flexible for Flox.

I like Flox. It gives you the whole Nix package universe without making you learn Nix first, which is exactly the trade I wanted. What it did not have was a proper IDE integration. So… you know how this goes by now.

Okay, so - Flexible for Arduino.

I have a drawer full of ESP32 boards. You know how it goes. And the thing that always got me was the serial monitor: the board resets, spits out a Guru Meditation panic, resets again, and you sit there squinting at a wall of scrolling output trying to work out what died.

This one took a while: Flexible ABAP.

ABAP is one of those languages where you are basically stuck with whatever tooling SAP hands you. If you’ve spent time in Eclipse with ADT, you know exactly what I mean.

Alright, another one: AIVory Genie is out.

Everyone and their dog is shipping an AI agent plugin right now (woof). So why another one? Because I kept hitting the same two annoyances and got tired of it.

So this is an exciting one: we open sourced Slaide.

Here’s the problem it solves. Ask an AI for a deck and you get a .pptx back - which is a zip full of bulky XML that models get wrong constantly. Shapes overlap, text overflows, and you spend longer fixing it than you would have spent just making the thing yourself.

Okay, so… we built another product for AIVory: Smart Inference.

And the reason is simple: GPU inference is expensive, but most of the time you’re overpaying for it. There are $765 billion worth of GPUs out there and roughly half sit idle at any given time. That’s why providers offer them at a discount - if you can find their offers and keep track of the actual prices across 60+ providers. That takes time. So we built a service around it.

So this was a fun one: I applied for a spot at AI Founders Connect Frankfurt and got selected as one of five founders. It was a guided pitch competition at Google, organized by Daniel Pietschmann and Daniel Gerald Orbegoso Barrantes - who had already left me deeply impressed at their last event.

I got a 3D printer and started to dabble with modelling. I use AI agents for a lot of it, having them render the outcome so that they can see what they did. But I figured that often makes them go in loops. It’s tough to really describe what you want sometimes and in 3D space it’s even tougher.

I used to work with 3ds Max a bit - about 20 years ago - and I know that 3D modelling tools usually give you options to modify elements visually. OpenSCAD doesn’t. So I decided to build a tool myself.

The recording from last year’s Gründungsmesse Mittelhessen in Giessen is finally out. Big thanks to TiG for organizing the event and making this available.

In the talk I get into something I think about a lot: the cultural gap between Germany and the US when it comes to founding companies. Why did I end up starting my company in the US? It’s not because Germany lacks talent or ideas - it’s about the environment around those ideas. Risk tolerance, access to capital, the social stigma around failure - it all adds up.

Okay, so… we built another product for AIVory: AIVory Architect.

And the reason is simple: AI or not, it took me weeks to actually setup Terraform/Kubernetes, make it secure etc etc. So I looked around, noticed that there isn’t many visual editors around and decided to do that as a side project.

So this is an exciting one: I spent 48 hours at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub hackathon building SIMS - an AI-powered incident reporting system. Point your phone at a threat, record what you see, and AI handles the rest: transcription, threat analysis, GPS coordinates, automatic routing to responders. No more fumbling with phone calls during emergencies.

A quick personal note: we published the Cloudflare AI Markdown Worker. It’s a simple tool that detects AI agents (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.) and serves them markdown instead of HTML. Regular visitors get the normal site, AI agents get clean, token-efficient content.

Writing this from San Francisco - back in the city with self-driving cars and people actually building stuff. Perfect timing, because I’ve got news.

Remember AIVory? The AI assistant we launched in May? Yeah, that didn’t work. And I am not hiding it.

So I accidentally built a JetBrains plugin.

You know how it goes - you’re working on your main project (AIVory in my case), hit a wall, need to clear your head. Some people go for a walk. I… do projects like this.

Alright, I’ve been keeping quiet about this for too long… I finally get to talk about AIVory!

What is it? AIVory is a smart assistant that I’ve been working on for the past months. The basic idea: it helps you manage information overload by keeping track of your emails, messages, and other communication channels. It’s an AI that actually helps you rather than creating more noise.