Software Architecture · AI · Projects
Software systems grow, and AI becomes part of them. I build projects to find out how, then write down what they teach me.
PROFESSIONAL WORK
“We wanted to give our journalists as much time as possible to write. The results speak for themselves with an 80 percent increase in production efficiency.”
Aptoma’s editorial platform and CMS. Thousands of journalists at major media organisations work in it every day. My work on DrPublish runs through product design, architecture and code. I have worked on this and many other software systems for the last 25 years.
Roles through the years at Aptoma: Head of Product · Product Owner & UX Lead · Lead Developer · Head of Development · System Architect · AI Integration
What I’m building — and how.
The Scottish songwriter Jackie Leven (1950–2011) has been part of my life since I first saw him on stage in Drammen in the early 2000s. The site brings his own writing back from the Internet Archive and carries on the work of the people who once built jackieleven.com.
Local AI without a complicated setup. Ancilo is also my experiment in building a Rust app with coding agents, although I do not know the language myself.
Good stories from around the world, published in daily editions and ten languages. A map for readers, an editorial workspace behind it, and AI for research, writing and translation.
An interest in keeping bees in a way that respects their needs led me to Warré hives. The archive is my way of contributing my experience as a software developer to the community.
My manual transcription of a beekeeping book from 1798 grew into a digital edition with historical research, explanatory essays and a fable told from a bee’s perspective.
A calendar with one thought for each day, a short commentary beside it and a plate by Anna Atkins. The collection began with the Stoics. The opposite of a feed.
I wanted to build a language-learning app that worked for me. I took on too much in the first attempt. Now I am planning a smaller, gradual rebuild centred on conversation.
What I learn while building.
Moving my Jackie Leven site from PHP to Go showed me what clear architectural boundaries buy: the freedom to change technology while preserving the work.
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During the relaunch of undoom.news, I developed the editorial system iteratively with agentic coding. How everyday use led to targeted improvements in data access, indexes and caching.
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Building with agents changed what I need to understand myself — and where experience still matters.
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AI can produce code that works, passes its tests and still has the wrong shape. Programming experience is what makes that visible.
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Experience cannot be transferred by demonstration. Every developer needs room to discover agentic work through a project of their own.
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AI agents can give us more capable advisers than ever. The responsibility for deciding whom to trust, what helps and when to stop remains ours.
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I’m Stefan Grunert, a software architect from Germany, living in Skarnes, near Oslo. My interests include history, beekeeping, languages and philosophy. Some of my projects grow out of these interests.