Skip to content

Alt F4

Software that outlasts the hype.

Open source since 2012 — 7,500+ stars on the Go Elasticsearch client. Procurement platforms in production at DAX-listed companies. One person you actually talk to.

View projectsLet's talk →

What we stand for

Long-term thinking

We build software meant to run for years, not sprints.

Deep expertise

Decades of experience across procurement, logistics, and enterprise systems.

Honest craft

No shortcuts, no bloat. Clean architecture, maintainable code.

Partnership

We work with you, not for you. Your success is ours.

Modern tooling

We adopt what works. AI-assisted engineering lets us move faster and think deeper — not replacing expertise, but amplifying it.

Blog & Notes

  • Reinvent the wheel

    I've always been skeptical of those people who tell you to not reinvent the wheel. Seems like the people at Raycast are as well.

  • AI rewards people who know the why

    How do world-class design engineers like Emil Kowalski work with AI? They don't fight it — they feed it their taste: articulate the reasons, write them down, hand them over. Bicycles for their mind.

    That only works if you have the reasons.

    Think about it: Nobody prompts for Bauhaus, Sfumato, or Memphis without knowing design. Nobody steers a model towards a clean software architecture without the scars from a messy one. The lawyer who knows why a clause exists gets a better result than the one pasting boilerplate.

    The sleeper skill: writing. People who can write clearly have been prompting their whole lives without knowing it.

    Left unguided, LLMs regress to the mean of everything ever written. Median design. Median code. Median advice. AI slop. The why pulls the output off the average. One caveat: never forget that your hard-won experience is also your bubble.

    AI doesn't level the playing field. It multiplies whatever you bring — including zero.

  • Files, not Silos

    One aspect of using AI to automate many tasks of my job is that it allows me to work mostly with files. Simple, raw, text files. Any editor opens them. Git versions them, cat and grep simply work. You can copy and paste them, mail them, and post them on Slack.

    That's why Jira, Confluence and SharePoint always repelled me. They're silos. There's an API at best. But those silos tend to make it either hard or impossible to work with outside of their own tooling.

    Files deserve better. Maybe, one day, even sharing files with other people will be simple.

  • Shadscan

    Shadscan, a static analyzer for your shadcn components. Helps with accessibility, state, and composition regressions.

  • Enjoy the moment

    Be the person who leaves the phone in their pocket at a concert.

  • AI talk

    You won't find me comparing AI models or GPU performance. I just don't care. When I talk AI, I'm talking about the power dynamic between those in power, and the average person. I choose to focus on the drawbacks of AI while highlighting the potential of humanity. Using machines as a tool is cool, trading in your humanity isn't.
    Kelsey Hightower

  • crypto/passkeys

    Proposal to add crypto/passkeys to the Go standard library.

  • ZeroFS

    ZeroFS: A log-structured filesystem for S3.

  • Persistent Agent Memory

    Elastic labs post on how to build a persistent agent memory layer.

  • Remember…

    Remember when programming was still free?
View all posts →

Let's talk.

We use your details only to answer your request. Details in the privacy policy.

Prefer email?

hello@alt-f4.de