Michaël Krens

Flying CTO, investor & builder.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@levelsio Have been watching this way to long! Nice work

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

I couldn't agree more. I'll use this when I'm finding myself defending monoliths again. Unfortunate that the industry brought us here.
Good thing that AI coders are unlikely to make a bunch of services that talk over APIs instead of importing modules.
AI might save us.

[DHH @dhh]

Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

From a software developer perspective, LLMs make me do the work 5X faster. However, introducing complexity at this speed (especially when vibe coding) brings you to a point where the LLM does not do anymore what you want it to do and fixing it yourself becomes very tedious, especially when tempted to try the LLM again and again. It becomes a pain and not maintainable. Even when you carefully review the generated code, you don't internalize it in your human context of understanding as fast as if you wrote it yourself.
Point being, I wonder when (and if) it will become good enough for enterprise use where deep understanding of processes is required. I think the last 20% improvement will be hard to get right. Just like autonomous vehicles.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@levie WASM is a top contender to run agentic code for a specific task as it starts fast and is easy to distribute. This means a single compute unit can be any agent needed at the same time, massively decreasing infrastructure complexity.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@ekbuilds @dannypostma This! Be prepared to switch again @dannypostma

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@levelsio Bowling rocks! 🎳 Willing to give a clinic in Amsterdam for those interested 😊

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

Nancy Coblenz, at The ActOne Group nominated for the #WomenTech Global Awards 203! Share to raise awareness! #womenintech #womeninstem #womenwhocode #WTGA2023 @womentechnet https://t.co/eTBFSB8dO5

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

Great first impression @Adobe, let's start with getting images right 🎉

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@AnnaTMO @dabit3 True and now our vulnerabilities are gone because we copied the code, yay 🥳

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@rust_foundation This would still be allowed right? https://t.co/H7kz3ydQ92

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@rust_foundation I hope the community does not need this domain: https://t.co/H7kz3ydQ92

Just kidding of course, you'll figure it out. Rust is awesome.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@rust_foundation

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@Michael_Crist @ShaanVP Still rocking this as well 😎

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@FreddieSocially @levelsio Indeed, 50% should not happen. In the Netherlands though, if you take out the money out of your holding company for private use, you do end up paying roughly 50% in total.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@JohnySacrimoni @levelsio This is the best way to get your company addicted to 'free' money. In the future, getting more funding will be seen as a solution to solve problems more frequently and you end up like @levelsio describes.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@levelsio On top of that you have to deal with potentially stressful relationships with investors. Bootstrap all the way if you can!

When I get requests for seed investments I always try to find a way for them to not need it first.

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@dannypostma Nice and clear!

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@Cloudflare Wasm!

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@levelsio Search field isn't working on mobile, FYI

[Michaël Krens @mkrens]

@mossflwer @MrMoo28 @UPS Also had to do this in NL (Jan 2023). The contact phone number in the letter is also outdated. Please fix @UPS