Insights on AereA GmbH — Software that still runs in five years

How we develop with AI agents — and the safeguards that turned out to be necessary

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This text describes a pipeline that runs in production here — on a multi-tenant communication system built on ASP.NET Core, Angular and FreeSWITCH, with self-hosted GitLab. Every finding below comes from a real run and was found and fixed before the merge. We do not name the system, because individual findings would otherwise be traceable back to it.

What is the actual bottleneck in developing with AI? #

Not the speed at which code appears. The bottleneck is trust: code that compiles, whose tests are green and that reads correctly — and is wrong anyway. This class of defect accounts for almost every finding we have, and no standard pipeline sees it.

Build test automation in house or contract it out?

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why is the question framed wrongly? #

Test automation is not a project with an end but an estate with a maintenance load. The question is therefore not “who builds it” but “who maintains it in three years”. Skip that and you buy a test suite that is red after two releases, then skipped, then switched off — and you pay for it twice.

The guardrails we set for agents

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

May an agent write code in a regulated project? #

Yes — under the same conditions as a human. What matters is not who wrote the line but whether it is specified, reviewed, tested and released. Anyone who closes that chain can use agents. Anyone who opens it for agents has a problem with humans too.

Custom or standard software in energy management?

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When is a standard product enough? #

As long as your installation matches the picture the product was built for: one manufacturer, a manageable scope, an optimisation strategy from the catalogue. Then the manufacturer’s own system is practically unbeatable — available sooner, cheaper to enter, maintained by someone else. The tipping point almost never comes at purchase, but at the third special case.

OPC UA or MQTT for machine connectivity?

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is the difference in one sentence? #

OPC UA is an information model with a transport, MQTT is a transport without an information model. OPC UA describes what a value means — type, unit, membership, access rights. MQTT only moves it from A to B and leaves the meaning to your convention. Everything else follows from that single difference.

E2E tests against real databases with Testcontainers

info@aerea.de (AereA GmbH) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Why do we run end-to-end tests against a real database? #

Because a mock confirms the assumption you had while writing it, and a real database contradicts it. The failures that get expensive in distributed systems sit exactly where the mock knows nothing: in transaction boundaries, isolation levels, the ordering of migrations and the time zone behaviour of timestamps. A test against an in-memory substitute measures the substitute, not the system.