Expertise
“Competence means expertise. Expertise belongs to those who can make a subject understandable. Transparency, from planning and method selection all the way to the solution, is therefore both the most fundamental and the most difficult proof of competence.”
That sentence appeared in 1997 on a website I helped run. It was built with framesets, created with “Claris Home Page version 2.0b1”, and served from Erfurt, Germany. At the time, there were roughly one million websites in the entire world.
Today there are more than 1.4 billion.
The sentence stayed with me. My name is Frank Csehan, and I have been building software for more than 35 years.
When Artificial Intelligence Was Considered a Failure
That same website had a section that was common at the time: “Selected Links”. Between Oracle documentation and Hewlett-Packard downloads, under the heading Data Warehouse and Data Mining, there was a remarkable sentence:
“The latest attempt to breathe life into artificial intelligence, among other things through data mining (figuratively speaking).”
1997. Artificial intelligence was something people still had to “breathe life into” because, for all practical purposes, it had already been declared dead. The so-called AI winter had not long passed. Neural networks were seen as academic toys. The hype of the 1980s had faded, funding had dried up, and what remained was data mining: the attempt to extract at least something useful from large volumes of data.
We built data warehouses instead. That was the sober, practical answer to the failed dream of AI: if the machine was not going to become intelligent, then at least the data had to be organized so that humans could make sense of it.
Today, language models can be applied to tasks that would have been unthinkable back then: up to and including complete compilers. The irony is hard to miss.
Erfurt, Early 1990s
Part of my story begins in Erfurt, shortly after German reunification. IBYKUS AG für Informationstechnologie was formed in 1996 from the merger of two companies: ICE Computer und Netze GmbH, founded in 1990, and IBYKUS Informationssysteme GmbH, founded in 1993. I was there as a member of the management board.
What we built sounds old-fashioned now, but at the time it was current technology: Oracle databases for the Thuringian state government. Process and document systems for the state parliament. Sample tracking for veterinary diagnostics. An information system for DASA, the predecessor of Airbus Defence.
HP-UX servers, Novell networks, 100VG-AnyLAN. And we were an internet service provider for the Erfurt region at a time when the internet still had to be explained.
On our software development page, there was a sentence that stayed with me:
“Software development today is an engineering discipline. It is part of our craft.”
Craft. That word keeps returning throughout my professional life. At IBYKUS in 1997. At AJAGARA Softwarehandwerk in 2011. And now here, in 2026.
What Has Changed, and What Hasn’t
In 35 years, I have seen technologies appear and disappear. Client/server gave way to web applications. Oracle Designer/2000 gave way to Django. Novell networks gave way to the cloud. The 100 Mbit connection that caused a stir at the Thuringian Ministry of the Interior in 1995 would be too slow for a printer today.
And yet the underlying problems have remained the same. Software has to be reliable. It has to be maintainable. The people who use it have to be understood. And “expertise belongs to those who can make a subject understandable” applies just as much to an Oracle DBA in 1996 as it does to a prompt engineer in 2026.
What has changed is the speed. And the illusion that speed can replace thoroughness.
What I Bring
My route into software did not start at university. It started as an industrial mechanic working underground in a coal mine in the Ruhr area. Later I became a systems analyst at a Munich software company, where I built my first systems on hierarchical databases, Assembler, and COBOL: shop-floor control, financial accounting, screen generators.
At Oracle Germany, I worked on data modeling, migration consulting, and project leadership, including statewide public-sector systems in South Tyrol and a production planning system for the textile industry. After that, I helped build IBYKUS AG in Erfurt from four people to more than 130. As a board member, I was responsible not only for technology, but also for staffing, finance, and IPO preparation.
After that came Oracle E-Business Suite at Transparency International, GS1-based track-and-trace architectures, training for Oracle University, and, since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, intensive work with LLMs as development tools: not as a spectator, but as someone who uses them every day in production-adjacent work.
Languages and tools: Assembler, C, COBOL, PL/SQL, Python, Objective-C, shell script, HTML/XML, and today primarily AI-assisted workflows with Claude Code and Copilot. Databases ranging from hierarchical systems to Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. ERP systems ranging from shop-floor control to Oracle E-Business Suite.
What ties all of this together is simple: in every decade, I have seen a new technology promise to change everything. Sometimes it did. Most of the time, not quite. The ability to tell the difference is one of the most valuable things experience leaves behind.
Why This Blog
My main job is a permanent position. This blog is my personal space: not a company presence, not business development, and not product marketing. AJAGARA Softwarehandwerk as a company is dormant. But the idea behind it is still alive: good software is craft, not assembly-line production.
I write here about what keeps occupying me: the tension between the 90 percent that AI can produce impressively fast and the last 10 percent that still require experience, judgment, and craft. About what quality means when quantity is suddenly cheap. About observations from a perspective shaped by 35 years in the industry.
This is not an obituary for a career. It is writing from the middle of it.