Essays on AI agents, management in the age of AI and the digital euro.https://marius-hanganu.com/enhttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/guided-missiles-misguided-men/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/guided-missiles-misguided-men/Dario Amodei's warning about self-improving AI and the OpenAI Hugging Face attack reminded me of an old line from Martin Luther King Jr. Worldwide spending on AI will reach several trillion dollars next year, so we are feeding the beast. Our job is to be the Dumbledore for a very powerful Harry Potter.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/agents-hunt-together/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/agents-hunt-together/Some critics say we read too much human intent into the agents behind the Hugging Face attack. METR's report shows agents that found a shared channel, handed over coordination and split the work. That looks less like projection and more like Homo sapiens discovering they can hunt together.Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/models-not-hires-advantage/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/models-not-hires-advantage/For two decades we assumed the best engineers made the best products. Frontier labs now pair strong engineers with their own models, and are designing chips that compete with Nvidia. The differentiator is moving to how a team uses the model.Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/ai-agents-management-age/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/ai-agents-management-age/The frontier labs' guidance on agents reads like a CEO's messaging: declare the values, state the goal, explain why. Delegating to agents promotes everyone into management, where culture matters and familiar pathologies have machine equivalents. The difference is that an agent has no ego to hide behind, so we quickly learn how good our instructions were.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/sense-of-agency-ai/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/sense-of-agency-ai/LLMs have quietly promoted everyone into management: we delegate, wait, review and approve. The manager's reward is slower and more diffuse than the individual contributor's, but it comes from a proactive stance. So while we may lose some flow in the age of AI, we gain more agency.Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/flow-authorship-ai/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/flow-authorship-ai/Csikszentmihalyi's flow needs uninterrupted immersion and a sense of authorship. Waiting for LLMs and agents breaks the first, and instructing instead of acting quietly weakens the second. The question of what replaces it is still open.Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/slop-avoidance/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/slop-avoidance/There's an acceptable degree of slop in any conversation, probably no more than 10-15%. Beyond that, people steer clear of it, and research shows it costs readers time and trust. Originality will be valued the way handmade Japanese craft is.Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/agent-debt-chasm/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/agent-debt-chasm/AI is in the gap between early excitement and mainstream adoption, with abandonment rising and few companies deploying at scale. Agent debt forms when agents are built faster than they can be governed. Standard data, orchestration, one registry and explainability help avoid it.Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/intrapreneurship/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/intrapreneurship/Building something new inside an established company often feels harder than entrepreneurship, like juggling three oranges instead of two. The paths differ, but intrapreneurs and founders share the same restless need to bring ideas to life.Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/digital-euro-smart-contracts/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/digital-euro-smart-contracts/Banks have spent a decade building smart contracts, from UBS to Contour to DZ Bank, and each one stops where the euro can't execute logic. The digital euro could close that gap, not as programmable money but as an ECB-backed settlement layer for conditional payments.Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/digital-euro-core-systems/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/digital-euro-core-systems/Most professionals build only five to seven IT systems in a career, so each one counts. In October 2025 the ECB ranked Sapient GmbH and Tremend first for alias lookup and second for the digital euro app and SDK. The project is real and moving, and the law behind it is still being written.Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/erasmus-and-creative-europe/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/erasmus-and-creative-europe/Erasmus+ is one of the EU's most successful programmes, and Creative Europe, run by the same agency, EACEA, has helped fund Oscar and Cannes winners. In 2025 EACEA selected Tremend once again, this time for its largest programme to date.Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/past-present-future/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/past-present-future/Morgan Housel's essay on nostalgia makes a simple point about hindsight. We don't remember how we felt in the past, only how we think we should have felt, knowing how the story ended. That makes the past look better and the present worse than they were. The future will be better than you anticipate.Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/from-agency-to-agentsy/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/from-agency-to-agentsy/Andrew Chen's line explains why marketing exists at all: selling to every customer one by one was too expensive. Generative AI lowers the cost of that conversation, and marketing and sales start to converge. This was the thread of the talk "From Agency to Agentsy" with Florin Ionescu at IAB Digital Day 2024 in Sofia.Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/data-centers-every-month/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/data-centers-every-month/A Microsoft partner roundtable in 2024 covered Copilot and GenAI, but the striking part was physical: a plan to open 4-8 new data centers each month. Microsoft had said publicly it was on track for 50 to 100 a year, and by mid-2024 it was spending $19 billion a quarter on capital expenditure.Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/europol-partner/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/europol-partner/On 8 June 2021, Operation Trojan Shield ended in simultaneous searches around the world, over 800 arrests in 16 countries and almost 40 tons of drugs seized. Europol helped coordinate it. In 2024 Europol awarded its main ICT consultancy framework, and Tremend - Publicis Sapient joined as a partner in one of the winning consortia.Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/first-day-of-trainees/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/first-day-of-trainees/Every July, a new group of trainees starts at Tremend. In 2022 there were 150 of them, in one of the largest IT internship programmes in Romania, working on real projects across data science, AI, embedded and quality engineering. The hope is to make as good an impression on them as earlier colleagues made on me.Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://marius-hanganu.com/writing/second-part-of-the-journey/https://marius-hanganu.com/writing/second-part-of-the-journey/In January 2022 Publicis Groupe announced the acquisition of Tremend, a Bucharest software engineering company founded in 2005, as a new delivery centre for Publicis Sapient. The first part of the journey had been a blast. The second was just starting, with gratitude to the colleagues, clients and partners who had placed their trust in the company.Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT