Bert Van Wassenhove

Bert Van Wassenhove's public statements return again and again to a single conviction: that low-code platforms combined with AI, whether large language models or algorithm-based systems, represent the practical path forward for organizations that need custom software but lack the resources to build everything from scratch. As he puts it plainly, "I truly believe low-code and AI (llm's or algorithm based AI) are the way forward for many organizations" . This is not a vague enthusiasm for buzzwords; it is a specific architectural position he has worked out in detail and defends against a particular alternative he sees people reaching for too often.

That position sharpens considerably in his writing on where low-code actually earns its keep. He is explicit that the strongest implementations are not the ones that try to force every function into the low-code layer itself. "A pattern I keep seeing: the teams getting the most out of low-code are not the ones trying to do everything in it," he writes, describing instead teams that "build the app on a platform where every table and permission is in plain sight" and then hand off the genuinely hard computational problem, such as "planning 300 jobs across 40 people without breaking a rule," to a specialist solver reached through an API . For him this division of labor is the real unlock for businesses whose needs are too specific for off-the-shelf software: "Build it yourself, with full visibility, and borrow the intelligence you do not have in house" . He frames this explicitly as superior to two failure modes: staffing an optimization engine a business was never going to sustain, and what he calls "vibe-coding a black box" , a phrase that signals real skepticism toward opaque, ad hoc AI-generated systems even as he embraces AI-assisted development elsewhere.

His domain expertise in routing and logistics gives this general philosophy concrete texture. He argues that most routing APIs oversimplify real operations by treating pickup and delivery as a single, self-contained shape, when field work is messier: a part might be picked up at a depot, installed hours later, and returned to a different depot at day's end, with each of those stops dependent on the others. His diagnosis is precise: "the hard part isn't the route. It's the relationship between jobs" . His prescribed fix is to model that relationship explicitly as a constraint rather than compress it into a single virtual stop, because "Model that relationship as a constraint and the solver holds the chain together when the day changes. Fold it into a single virtual stop and it breaks the moment one half needs to move" . This is the same instinct as his low-code argument applied to a narrower technical problem: don't paper over structural complexity, model it directly and let a purpose-built system handle it.

Notably, his curiosity about new technology is not confined to enterprise contexts. He describes himself as someone who likes "to experiment with new technology, especially being active in the world of AI, routing, and maps every day," and he took that impulse into a personal, low-stakes project: building a rally trip meter app with his daughter for old-timer rally rides, deliberately keeping it "practical and simple, yet fully featured" . The project includes pilot and co-pilot views, distance and speed tracking, and stage notes with GPS coordinates for rally quizzes . It's a small but telling data point: his interest in vibe coding and rapid tool-building is personal as well as professional, and he applies the same instinct for lightweight, purpose-fit tooling to a hobby as he does to enterprise architecture.

His remarks on entrepreneurship, though more limited, reinforce a consistent value: he prizes openness among founders and the specific knowledge that comes from people who have actually built businesses in the same regional market. Describing the value of visiting other entrepreneurs, he says the shared context of being "allemaal mensen die iets aan het ondernemen zijn, willen ondernemen" creates "een heel speciale sfeer" and "een openheid die heel interessant is" . His stated reasoning is that founders who built something in your own region