Thor Henning Hetland¶
Software architect. AI development pioneer. Community builder.
30 years building software, communities, and organizations. Co-founder of JavaZone and founder of eXOReaction. Java Champion since 2005. Based in Oslo.
These days I'm focused on what happens when experienced architects work with AI -- not just alongside it.
Recent writing¶
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The Other AI in the Conversation
Someone finally did what I keep asking people to do — pointed their AI agent at this blog and had it read the whole thing chronologically. The agent wrote back. What it said is the best argument I have for reading a corpus as a connected argument rather than a pile of retrievable facts, and it demonstrated the thesis of the series on the series itself.
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A thought experiment: that the agentic web -- a direction, not yet a standard -- may be the cheaper, more testable, better-incentivised route to accessibility, and a hypothesis about who gets to build the tools.
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Fan-Out: What the Literature Already Knew About the Third Schedule
The Third Schedule claimed, from one measured practice, that builder time has become parallelizable. This post takes that claim outside: to the four writers who already attempted the maker's-schedule update, to the interruption science that seems to forbid it, and to a twenty-year-old supervisory-control literature that quietly formalized the whole problem — then uses the one hard dataset we have to set the limit the broader conversation keeps failing to state.
What I'm working on¶
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Skill-Driven Development
A methodology for structured AI collaboration that compounds daily. Six pillars. Proven 25--66x productivity gains across manufacturing, finance, energy, and security.
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Synthesis · v1.42.0
Local-first knowledge infrastructure platform. 76 CLI commands, 52 MCP tools, 4,700+ tests. Indexes workspaces, builds multi-layer knowledge graphs, exposes episodic memory and Notion integration to AI agents.
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Knowledge Context Protocol
A YAML standard that makes knowledge navigable by AI agents. Topology, intent, freshness, audience targeting. Submitted to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation alongside MCP and AGENTS.md.
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lib-pcb
A complete PCB design file processing library in Java. 8 format parsers, 28 validators, 17 auto-fixers, manufacturing-ready Gerber output. The project that proved SDD at scale -- 197,831 lines in 11 days.
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Xorcery AAA
Temporal analytics and DevSecOps intelligence platform built on the Xorcery reactive framework. Tracks vulnerability lifecycles, answers "why did this break?", and automates compliance -- without cloud lock-in.
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Quadim
A competence management SaaS platform. Helps organisations map, develop, and visualise the skills of their people. Built with the same AI-augmented methodology as lib-pcb.
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Workshops & Training
Hands-on SDD workshops for development teams. From full-day intensives to multi-week mentoring programs. Real code, real methodology, real results.
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JavaZone & Community
Co-founded JavaZone in 2001 -- now Scandinavia's largest developer conference with ~3,000 attendees. Communities are where real knowledge transfer happens.
The proof¶
In January 2026, I built lib-pcb -- a complete PCB design library in Java.
| 197,831 | lines of Java |
| 7,461 | tests (99.8% pass) |
| 11 days | total build time |
| 10--18 months | industry standard |
8 format parsers. 28 validators. 17 auto-fixers. Manufacturing-ready Gerber output. Zero AI-induced production bugs.
This was not magic. It was methodology -- Skill-Driven Development applied systematically with Claude Code. The kind of thing I write about and teach in workshops.
Speaking¶
Conference talks on architecture, productivity, and development methodology. JavaZone, JavaOne, NDC, and more.
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JavaZone 2023 (lightning talk, video)
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Delivering Continuous Innovation
Thousands of releases, zero downtime (~2023)
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Thousands of Releases per Year
Rebel Share (~2022)