Skip to content

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.

Start here Read the blog About me

Thor Henning Hetland

Recent writing

  • The Negative Control

    The Third Schedule series argued from one practitioner's git history that builder time has become parallelizable. This closing piece does what the other four could not: runs the same measurement pipeline against ten other real datasets — public open-source repos, venture builds, client platforms, and, most importantly, the git history of a conventional non-agentic developer. The negative control comes back with a result that breaks the series' headline metric — and sharpens what actually survives.

    August 25, 2026

  • 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.

    August 25, 2026

  • The Third Schedule: A Field Survey

    The Third Schedule argued from one practitioner's git history that builder time has become parallelizable. This companion piece takes that claim out into the field: what has actually been published — by practitioners, telemetry vendors, HCI researchers, and skeptics — on parallel-agent work, oversight bandwidth, and measured AI-era commit patterns, and how does each claim hold up when checked against the one dataset in this conversation that is fully measured?

    August 25, 2026

All posts

What I'm working on

  • 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.

    About eXOReaction

  • 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.

    Knowledge Infrastructure · Open Source

  • 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.

    Knowledge Infrastructure

  • 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.

    Open Source

  • 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.

    Open Source

  • 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.

    quadim.ai

  • Workshops & Training

    Hands-on SDD workshops for development teams. From full-day intensives to multi-week mentoring programs. Real code, real methodology, real results.

    Get in touch

  • JavaZone & Community

    Co-founded JavaZone in 2001 -- now Scandinavia's largest developer conference with ~3,000 attendees. Communities are where real knowledge transfer happens.

    Organizations

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.

All presentations