# Mathys van Abbe — Full Content Archive All 221 published items, newest first. Single-file markdown mirror of the entire public archive on mathys.to. Each item block is delimited by a YAML frontmatter header. Intended for LLM consumption in one fetch instead of crawling 218 mirror URLs. Generated: 2026-08-08 --- --- title: "What am I doing now?" url: https://www.mathys.to/writing/now/what-am-i-doing-now-24711/ section: now published: 2026-05-26 words: 907 --- # What am I doing now? *And what is on my mind at the moment.* > "People often ask me what I’m doing now. Each time I would type out a reply, describing where I’m at, what I’m focused on, and what I’m not. So in 2016 I added a /now page to my website. A simple link. Easy to remember. Easy to type. It’s a nice reminder for myself, when I’m feeling unfocused. A public declaration of priorities." # I am in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and focussing on the following things: 2025 has been another rocky year. Both professionally and in our personal lives. Sophie and I split up after 14 years. The dust is still settling, but the kids are thriving and so am I. I have been reading a lot. Please check [my Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/98437272-mathys-van-abbe) for the latest reviews. I also post often about my learnings on this blog. Like with [this one](https://www.mathys.to/news/blog/comfort-is-a-killer-thats-why-i-want-my-kids-and-my-parents-to-suffer-a-little-24657) about The Comfort Crisis. I maintain to work out daily, in the Soho gym. And I've been walking at least 20.000 steps a day. This keeps me fit mentally and physically. Walking is mindful and has many many health benefits so I suggest taking walking meetings over (or with) coffee any time. My current streak is 1178 days, averaging over 21.500+ steps a day [over the last year](https://www.mathys.to/news/blog/1000-days-in-amsterdam-without-a-bike-a-journey-of-mind-body-and-city-24337) 💪. As soon as it get light earlier in the morning I will also pick up the sunrise paddle boarding. Join me if you want to experience Amsterdam (and me) at our finest. ## **Amélie, Mika, Eli and Mia** They are growing up so fast! I'm extremely blessed to experience the development of my four kids [front row](https://www.mathys.to/news/blog/surprise-im-celebrating-100-years-this-month-24395). Amélie had the most amazing gap year and has now succesfully started Med School in Amsterdam. She is the sweetest, most empathetic girl I know, often teaching me I can be blunt and too direct. Mika is in his final exams of highschool. He loves gaming and watching shows. He works as a sous chef in V12, a restaurant in Amsterdam-Noord. He has nice friends and is very stubborn like his dad. If all goes to plan he'll go to Delft next year. Eli just got his advise to go to VWO. He's contemplating Gymnasium. He's very social, starts his adolescence early and becomes naughty. Mia turned 7. She has more energy than anyone I know. Next week she'll finally get her swimming diploma. She's very funny and does great in school. ## 🧠 Playbook Is Gaining Momentum [Playbook](https://www.mathys.to/news/blog/playbook-reviving-the-heart-of-teamwork-in-a-digital-world-24332) is off to a great start of 2026. After quietly building for a while, Playbook is now in the hands of real teams—municipalities, NGOs, and founders—using it to kickstart new projects, align their teams, and turn knowledge into action. We’re helping teams move from: - 📊 info overload → to shared clarity - 🙇‍♂️ silent solo work → to structured collaboration - 🎯 vague goals → to real-world habits that stick It works especially well for: - Project onboarding - Team learning journeys - Embedding a “mentor mindset” in your org - Capturing internal expertise without endless PDFs If you’re part of a team that feels stuck, scattered, or siloed—and you’re ready to try a different way of working—let’s talk. We’re still early, but the signal is strong. → [Check out Playbook](https://www.playbook.works) → Or ask me for a personal walkthrough ## **💬 Advising Brave Founders** I [work](https://www.mathys.to/page/advisory-board) with a small number of early-stage founders each month—helping them sharpen their story, focus their energy, and raise with confidence. If you’re building something meaningful and want a trusted sparring partner (not a yes-man, not a slide deck factory), I offer: - 1:1 strategy sessions - Fast feedback on product, pitch, and priorities - Warm intros—when it makes sense **Two tracks:** - €1K/month + 2.5% equity (pre-funding, only if you raise) - €2.5K/month + 1% equity (post-funding, more structured) 💡 If that sounds like something you need, [email me](mailto:mathys@mathys.to) or send a voice memo. I like founders who move fast and ask good questions. ## **Tag The Love** Build the most beautiful platforms for the stuff you love. Tag The Love helps you achieve your online goals by helping you **create** a superior content and web app platform fueled with powerful stories. And then it facilitates you to manage it in the easiest possible way. ## **Do you need my help?** I also posted this on my social media, so why not here: If you have lost your job or your company doesn't thrive as usual and we have ever crossed paths, went to school/university together or our paths crossed in any other way (even if you just stumbled onto my blog here), don't hesitate to [contact me](https://www.mathys.to/contact) and let me know how I can assist you. - Can I introduce you to someone or a company? - Can I write you a LinkedIN recommendation? - Do you want me to vouch for some of your skills? - Do you need a conversation for a positive mindset? Do you need to bounce ideas off of me, wanna brainstorm, need a second pair of eyes, or a second heart? **Weekly** Every weekend (Saturday or Sunday, depending on the family planning) I'm opening up my calendar for half a day to help out others. Can be moving or assembling some furniture, driving your grandmother somewhere, mentoring, really just lending a helping hand. Please [reach out](https://mathys.to/contact) if you can use my help. [#helpothers](https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/helpothers?__eep__=6&__cft__[0]=AZXuwHqTnE5n0mU1svJKLH4RWjcgSlpC9qptaYJUp8Sj3WkhgW5zEXhtjYHmhk6xSwhmMBbX5tv-Lmq7-6xSjt7JT6e6cKvuNHJKPgRfpzEYcNlZpamGhi7ybuqeslOpjKo&__tn__=*NK-R) [#shareknowledge](https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/shareknowledge?__eep__=6&__cft__[0]=AZXuwHqTnE5n0mU1svJKLH4RWjcgSlpC9qptaYJUp8Sj3WkhgW5zEXhtjYHmhk6xSwhmMBbX5tv-Lmq7-6xSjt7JT6e6cKvuNHJKPgRfpzEYcNlZpamGhi7ybuqeslOpjKo&__tn__=*NK-R) [#useyournetwork](https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/useyournetwork?__eep__=6&__cft__[0]=AZXuwHqTnE5n0mU1svJKLH4RWjcgSlpC9qptaYJUp8Sj3WkhgW5zEXhtjYHmhk6xSwhmMBbX5tv-Lmq7-6xSjt7JT6e6cKvuNHJKPgRfpzEYcNlZpamGhi7ybuqeslOpjKo&__tn__=*NK-R) [![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/2_42b196faece7974a_1280box.jpg)](mailto:vanabbe@gmail.com) These are my current priorities and I will update this page as my focus changes. **Current city:** Amsterdam, The Netherlands **Last updated:** January 2026 This post is inspired by Derek Sivers [The /Now Page movement](http://sivers.org/nowff) --- title: "Three Times From Scratch" url: https://www.mathys.to/writing/building/three-times-from-scratch-24706/ section: building published: 2026-05-05 words: 691 --- # Three Times From Scratch *The third time I threw it away, I didn't even feel bad about it. :) That's new.* # The PDF years For a while, whenever Rob finished an initial conversation with a prospect, we'd make a PDF. Proposal-light. Professional-looking. It took real effort and it was never quite right. Too much pricing, too soon. Too many assumptions dressed up as insight. A three-page explanation of what [Playbook](https://playbook.works) is, sent to someone who'd just spent an hour telling us what they needed. We knew it wasn't working. We kept making them anyway, because what else do you do? You don't rebuild the whole thing because it feels slightly off. Now I do. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_b2982ba89218e5de_1280box.png) # Version one Rob has a method. After a prospect conversation he writes a short report — his read of the situation, the organization, the challenge. We wanted to use that report as the seed. Feed it to AI, extract the five signals that matter for this specific prospect, generate a minisite that actually speaks to them. So I built an intake flow. Five steps. Thoughtful questions. Logic that held up on paper. I watched it run once and knew immediately. It felt like an audit. Like the prospect was filling out a form to qualify for help they'd already asked for. I'd built something that interrogated people before it had earned the right to. Threw it away. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_2b6c964223f551db_1280box.png) # Version two Flipped it. Rob uploads the report, AI extracts the signals, draft appears instantly. No intake. Just: here's what we think we know about you. The copy came out confident. Too confident. Whole paragraphs that spoke with certainty about things we'd only inferred from meeting notes. Rob read it and said: *this sounds like a cold email from someone who thinks they know me.* That's the sentence that killed version two. Back to zero. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_e219041dca597e2d_1280box.png) # Version three This one does something I didn't plan for. After Rob uploads his report, the AI extracts the five signals — but before it generates anything, it shows him which signals it found easily and which ones it had to guess at. Where the notes were thin. What was missing. *Next time, ask about decision-making structure earlier. Budget context was hard to infer.* Rob is getting better at his intake conversations because of a feedback loop I didn't design on purpose. It just appeared when I built the thing and looked at what it was doing. That's the version we're using. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_5a780d320df879df_1280box.png) # The neutral voice in the room Something I didn't expect: how useful it is to ask AI to critique what you just built. Not to help you build it. To tell you honestly if it works. I've been building things for twenty-five years. When a colleague looks at a prototype and says it isn't working, there's a layer of defensiveness you have to push through first. Your ego is in the room. You're managing the relationship alongside the feedback. With AI that layer is just... thinner. Ask the right questions: "*Does this feel like an assumption?" "Would a prospect feel understood or interrogated?"* — and you get a straight answer with nothing social attached to it. The willingness to hear feedback clearly is what actually drives iteration. Removing the friction from critique is underrated. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_2096bb5038ed2c6e_1280box.png) ### What made it hard The signal-extraction piece is genuinely difficult. Figuring out what counts as a meaningful behavioral signal versus background noise, in a short report written quickly after a meeting, that's not a solved problem. I used to love hitting walls like this for competitive reasons. If it's hard for us, it's hard for anyone who tries to copy us. Now I love it for a different reason: hard problems are where the real learning is. You can't shortcut your way to an insight that only shows up through building. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_b41849605d85c386_1280box.png) Three full rebuilds. In the old model; developer, sprint, delivery, one of those would have been a crisis. A planning failure. Something to explain. Here it was a Tuesday. Two of them, maybe. That's the shift. Not that you can build faster. It's that you can afford to be wrong, follow the insight, and throw away the thing you just made without it costing you the project. The PDF never taught us anything. The rebuilds taught us everything. --- title: "When in doubt, C." url: https://www.mathys.to/writing/building/when-in-doubt-c-24686/ section: building published: 2026-04-21 words: 308 --- # When in doubt, C. *This is a nice example of how LLMs are biased. * Structurally, Claude will suggest you take the simple solution for a problem you're experiencing. Historically speaking, that's the smart solution. In times of costly development hours, there's a need for constant triage. Is this investment worth the upside? Spending time on this will eat time on something maybe more important. But in a time of abundance, which we now live in when it comes to development resources, this changes entirely. Here's my LLM telling me to combine two partial solutions because the complete one is "te veel werk voor nu." It's technically correct advice—if you're [paying engineers](https://www.mathys.to/news/blog/the-scarcity-filter-24685) $150/hour and shipping features matters more than architecture. ![](https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/images/2022/03/14/22ITL003_risk-ai-final.jpg) But I'm not. I'm paying the LLM the same whether it writes 40 lines or 400. The "2-3 dagen werk" estimate was calculated in a world where that time cost money and opportunity. In this world, it costs an afternoon of iteration. The LLM doesn't know this. It pattern-matched on 30 years of software projects where C was always too expensive. It looks at all the historical data available on software development and tells you the thorough solution you're looking for is not worth the development time. It bases that judgment on its 30-year knowledge of development projects it's trained on. > It highly underestimates its own capabilities. So it confidently tells me to take the compromise, hash-skip for 80%, morphdom for the polish, accept the edge cases. Meanwhile, option C sits there: best UX, works offline, no client-side diffing complexity, no libraries, no bugs from "kleine changes." The only thing wrong with C is that it used to be expensive. Thankfully we understand. So always pick C. Go native. Build the thing that would've been "too thorough" in 2015. Those frameworks that speed things up? They were invented to compress development time when development time was the constraint. It isn't anymore. Pick C. ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_8ccbd3011dc97cae_1280box.jpg) --- title: "The Scarcity Filter" url: https://www.mathys.to/writing/building/the-scarcity-filter-24685/ section: building published: 2026-04-11 words: 1050 --- # The Scarcity Filter *How the cost of building shaped what we ever dared to imagine — and why that's finally changing.* For as long as I've been building things, and that's over 25 years now, there's been a filter running in the background of every product conversation I've ever had. It's not a written rule. Nobody puts it on a slide. But it shapes everything. The filter is this: > 'We only seriously consider building the things we can afford to build.' ![Screenshot from my E-reader notes plugin app](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_724dd8ed313e7b0e_1280box.png) *Screenshot from my E-reader notes plugin app* *above: Screenshot from my E-reader Note plugin app.* And for most of the history of software, what you could afford to build was determined almost entirely by one constraint: **Developer resources**. Dev power is expensive. It's scarce. It compounds, you can't just throw more at a problem without coordination costs eating the gain. So over time, we all learned to pre-filter. Before an idea ever made it to a roadmap, it passed through an invisible committee in your head: Is this worth a sprint? Does this justify a hire? Could I ever get this prioritized? Most ideas died there. Not because they were bad. Because they were small. Fun. Speculative. Hard to justify in a resourcing conversation. We got very good at building the things that were worth the cost. And we quietly stopped imagining the rest. What happens when the filter disappears? ![](https://d1ydx93l5afdxo.cloudfront.net/cms/250_53d6861dcb4b1f32_1280box.png) *above: Screenshot from the chat assistent of my builder platform.* This past month, I ran an experiment. Not intentionally, I just started building, and then couldn't stop. In 31 days I built 15 projects: A w**eather/what-to-wear app** with my son Eli. A **food app** for the family. A **Playbook generator**. A **shortstay aggregator** pulling three booking platforms into one dashboard. A platform to help others **build with AI**. A **Mobypicture exporter**. A **recipe database** for a friend. A genuinely cool **alarm clock** (App Store next week). A **notes plugin** for e-readers. A **journaling platform**. A **day planner**. A smart **TV journaling app**. Four **iOS apps**. The **scheduling tool** I'd been meaning to build for literally years. I asked Claude to dig through my code and time spent afterward: 275,000 net lines of code across 906 commits (changes sent to the production server). Around 210 hours of active Claude time, about 7 hours a day. Equiv