The Creative Agentic Engineer

So I tried a lot. Consulting, HR and headhunting, purchasing and supply-chain consulting, customer experience in after-sales, due diligence. Clients in banking, automotive, HR, innovation management and academia.

Then the startup world: Customer Success and Sales. A totally new world, and I loved it. But something was missing. I explained things I didn't really understand. How does that work? What are the inner workings? And I wanted to create more.

But I had no idea where to start. Over time I found the entrance. First writing poetry, then sketching characters. Then using Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to create books. Then Canva, Framer, WordPress, HTML, JavaScript, the list got long. Soon, I couldn't stop.

Creating, developing, bringing to life: books, podcasts, videos, content, websites, web apps, mobile apps, AI agents, automations, classification models, quizzes, worlds, characters, pathways, business models, operating systems, MCP servers, product designs. The list is long, and I tried it all. I went deeper and deeper, until I realized it is part of my DNA.

If I don't create, I suffer. It's like breathing.

Back to personality types. DISC, HIGH5, 16Personalities, cognitive profiles and many more, some good, some bad. Nothing stuck.

Until a coach of mine dropped the word neurodivergence. What if my brain is just wired a bit differently? It would explain the awkward feeling I so often have: saying something and no one gets it, seeing something no one else sees, sensing something no one else perceives. What if there is a layer I operate on that not everyone operates on, and others have theirs that I don't get? And what if that is okay?

A new world opened. With it, FastBrainer was born, the image of a fast brain, then Madame Pendula, and FIPAC: 30 archetypes for people who are Fast, Intense, comPlex, Aware and Creative. Me, and other me's ticking similarly.

• Fast. The brain is fast, sometimes overly fast, and runs against walls and into big fat loopholes at times.
• Intense. Hour-long deep dives into projects where eating, drinking and peeing (yes, peeing) are forgotten for hours.
• comPlex. Even we are confused about ourselves. Describe yourself in three words? I sense thousands and none at the same time. A favourite answer of mine became: "I am diverse within."
• Aware. Of sentiments, feelings, patterns and dynamics, sometimes knowingly, sometimes just sensing that something is different. And learning that not every discrepancy needs solving. Most of them just want to be sensed, accepted, and moved on from.
• Creative. An overly active, flexible, adaptable mind that loves to create, is curious, and puts its nose into everything that isn't bei drei auf dem Baum (literally: up a tree by the count of three, so everything that doesn't get away in time). Great for creating things. It also makes "What do you do?" unbelievably hard to answer, and "the one thing" almost impossible.

FIPACs are wonderful human beings, with all our quirks, interests and curiosities.

FIPAC made SO much sense to me when I created it. And it didn't feel like a box: more like a loose frame that doesn't label, force or stifle. It helped me get playful about "Who am I? What is going on here?", and to enjoy all these quirks.

→ Want to find your FIPAC archetype? Take the test and have fun with it. (Don't take it too seriously - it is not yet statistically validated.)

Back to creating. A developer team was supposed to build me a prototype of a relationship manager: something to organize my chaos of people, events, companies and connections in my note pads, Notion and pen & paper. A personal LinkedIn, a CRM that felt intuitive and natural, without the frustrating part of typing in every data point by hand. The project failed, and I decided it was time to build it myself.

Naive, with absolutely no idea of coding (I could navigate tech products well, but had no idea what an API or JSON was), I gave myself six weeks to build it for a pitch event, using AI as well as I could. That was spring/summer 2025, right before NY Tech Week. I presented a live demo. It worked. Somehow, at least.

The product didn't make it. (Well: I have since built the same thing for my own operations, and it works like a charm :D) But I was hooked. There was another world beyond the one I knew: a different language, different tools, different opportunities. No more endless button clicking and UI building (I still love it, but differently). There it was: CLIs, databases, deployments, frontends and backends, AI agents, frameworks, systems, designs. New ways to bring my creations to life.

I am notoriously chaotic and slow with the simple button-clicking, context-switching tasks, and I get overwhelmed fast.

So: what if AI and software did all that messy, slow, operational work, and I only put in what I want and review the result?

My operating system was born, and I worked on it day and night. Literally, at times :D Even when I took a job in post-sales, I was more into building systems that sped up the manual work.

Since then I have built applications, automations and agents for fitness and wellness, project management, client management, finance and trading, productivity, GTM, sales, customer success, lead generation, developer tooling, marketing, content, search and GEO, character development, world building, e-commerce, community management, and more, at different levels of refinement. And it feels like there is so much more to dive into, to develop, to create, to bring to life and to improve.

What excites me: making processes easier, so we can focus on what we enjoy. Seeing something go from 0 to 1, and to 100 too. Designing experiences that feel as smooth as possible. Understanding the layers beneath the ones we work on, and how they shape what gets decided above. Learning what makes us human: where these systems enrich our work, and where it is better to put the computer aside, look each other in the eye, and feel the sand under our feet and the wind in our hair.

This journey made my thinking sharper, my mind more analytical, and my judgement more refined. Is it the solution for everything? For sure not. But it is what I enjoy right now, and so far the excitement doesn't stop.

Agentic engineering, with human oversight, and with emotion, taste and judgement. The fun, playful, creative kind: VS Code and Claude Code, and above all systems design, architecture, structure and the orchestration of your AI agents. Diving into the layers that matter, so that your product and your automations do what you want, your book speaks your language, and your finances are structured properly. The world is your oyster.

I would never have become this good at engineering if I hadn't known what good looks like in products: from my clients, from my own experience, and from the things that frustrate me so much that I want a solution. Start with your frustrations, and you are in a good spot.

Are you a giraffe in the water and a penguin on land? Or a giraffe on land and a penguin in the water? Strive for the latter, and let go of the former.

There are two ways to get there: move the penguin into the water, or turn the penguin into a giraffe. The first is the better option. The second may be doomed to fail: you can try changing yourself until you are old and grey, or you accept that you are as you are and look for the place that brings out the best in you, where you swim like a happy penguin in the water.

That's what I strive for. It's what led me to so many changes of path, career and direction. It looks chaotic from the outside. Surprise: it is from the inside too. But there is truth in "trust the process", even when you doubt it all the way and feel completely lost. It reveals itself if you let it, instead of forcing it into structures before it had time sich zu entfalten (to unfold).

So here we are. The why, the how, and now the what, so that it's not only me who sees my work come to fruition, but you too.

Most of you know me as someone with zero coding experience. Let's change that. Not for me, but for you: so that everyone can become fluent in agentic engineering and bring their own ideas to life. Think about what you could build with the skills and the domain expertise you already bring to the table. Don't overcomplicate it. Shall we?

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