The adoption of AI code assistants is accelerating in science parks from Louvain-la-Neuve to Liège. While the promise of speed is real, the risk of generating invisible technical debt has never been higher. For Belgian entrepreneurs, acting as a “good family father” now means securing your business logic before letting AI write the code.
Wallonia and Brussels are experiencing undeniable digital momentum. Driven by strategies like Digital Wallonia and the Digital Plan, our scale-ups no longer have anything to envy from their European neighbors. In this race for growth, the use of AI assistants (like Copilot or ChatGPT) has become the norm for accelerating Time-to-market.
Yet, a concern is growing in boardrooms and among experienced CTOs. Belgians have, as we say, “a brick in their stomach”: we like solid, durable, concrete things. However, code massively generated by AI increasingly resembles a quick construction on shifting foundations.
Here’s why AI speed can become a trap for your organization, and how to restore prudent management of your technological capital.
The Productivity Paradox: The “Velocity Trap”
It’s tempting to measure a development team’s productivity by the number of lines of code produced or features delivered. With AI, this production cost tends toward zero. This is where the danger lies.
AI generates code faster than your developers can understand or review it. Without a rigorous domain model, you’re not building a product; you’re piling up logic. The result? An invisible “spaghetti” architecture that paralyzes innovation as soon as you try to pivot or scale.
For a Walloon tech SME, the cost of having to rewrite everything after 18 months (the famous refactoring) can be fatal. This isn’t just a technical issue, it’s a major operational risk.
The “Good Family Father” Approach Applied to Code
In Belgian law, the concept of “good family father” designates prudent, diligent, and reasonable management. Applied to modern software development, this means one thing: separate business logic (your real asset) from implementation (the code).
This is precisely Ontologiq’s mission. We’re not here to replace your developers, but to provide the essential architectural blueprint before laying the first brick.
Ontologiq acts as a “semantic safety net”:
- Capture tribal knowledge: Rather than letting your business knowledge get lost in Google Docs or Slack threads, our engine structures it into a precise ontology.
- Ensure consistency: Before asking an AI to write a function, Ontologiq checks the impact of this change on your entire system (UI, Database, API).
Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Importance of the “Prompt Engine”
The problem isn’t artificial intelligence, but the quality of the instructions we give it. If your User Stories are vague, the AI will “hallucinate” a solution that seems to work but will introduce logical flaws.
Ontologiq reverses this dynamic via its Prompt Engine. We transform your conversations and strategic meetings into rigorous technical specifications (Gherkin, relational graphs) before a single line of code is generated.
For regulated sectors (Fintech, Biotech, Medtech) very present in Walloon Brabant, this is a guarantee of traceability. You can prove why the system acts in a certain way, because the logic is documented and decoupled from the code.
Conclusion: Invest in Structure
Innovation must not come at the expense of robustness. For Belgian entrepreneurs, the goal is to build sustainable companies, capable of withstanding technological shocks.
Code is a commodity; your product intelligence is your real asset. Secure it.
Want to audit the solidity of your business logic? [Book a technical demo] – No commitment, discover how Ontologiq visualizes your architecture in real-time.