field notes · zurich, switzerland

Aymen Furter

Building “thinking machines” that live in the cloud.

Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft working on GitHub Copilot, with a background in designing cloud-native architectures and AI agent implementations.

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Aymen Furter the author, est. 1987

Professional Experience

My professional journey in technology

Boxalino
PRODYNA
Zurich
Microsoft
'07 '08 '09 '10 '11 '12 '13 '14 '15 '16 '17 '18 '19 '20 '21 '22 '23 '24 '25 '26
JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Boxalino
PRODYNA
Zurich
Microsoft

Microsoft

Sep 2022 – Present Zurich, Switzerland
Current

Senior Software Engineer

Aug 2026 – Present
  • Working on GitHub Copilot, building agentic developer experiences

Solution Engineer – Cloud & AI Apps

Jul 2025 – Aug 2026
  • Designed cloud-native architectures and AI agent implementations for Swiss enterprises through hands-on prototyping and deep-dive technical sessions
  • Evangelized coding agents and LLM-powered developer workflows, helping engineering teams integrate tools like GitHub Copilot into their SDLC

Application Innovation Technology Specialist

Mar 2025 – Jul 2025
  • Built proof-of-concepts for RAG pipelines, MCP integrations, and agentic systems on Azure infrastructure

Cloud Solution Architect

Sep 2022 – Feb 2025
  • Architected Azure landing zones, containerized workloads, and AI integration patterns through hackathons and architecture design sessions
  • Built agent-based code review platform and investigation tooling with structured evaluation frameworks and observability hooks

Zurich Insurance Group

Jun 2017 – Aug 2022 Zurich, Switzerland

Tech Lead / Platform Architect

Jun 2017 – Aug 2022
  • Architected large-scale API gateway and microservices infrastructure handling 2M+ monthly transactions
  • Led cloud migration initiatives moving critical workloads to Azure
  • Operated and maintained business-critical Kubernetes clusters

PRODYNA (Schweiz) AG

Jan 2015 – May 2017 Zurich, Switzerland

IT Consultant

Jan 2015 – May 2017
  • Delivered expert consulting on software architecture for enterprise clients
  • Designed APIs and integration solutions using Java and Apache Camel
  • Implemented microservices architectures for financial services clients

Boxalino AG

May 2007 – Dec 2014 Zurich, Switzerland

Senior Java Developer

May 2007 – Dec 2014
  • Led development of e-government and B2B/B2C platforms using Java, modern frontend frameworks, and REST APIs
  • Built native iOS and hybrid mobile applications
  • Designed and implemented scalable backend systems

Featured Projects

Solution accelerators and AI experiments

AI Engineer Coach

GitHub ↗  ·  ★ 3441

An open-source VS Code extension that analyzes your local AI coding sessions and turns them into actionable insights — no data leaves your machine.

Highlights

  • Works across harnesses: VS Code agent, Claude, Codex, OpenCode, and Copilot CLI
  • Detects anti-patterns with 45 rules across prompt quality, session hygiene, and context management
  • Measures AI-generated code volume by language, workspace, model, and harness
  • Finds repeated prompts and turns them into reusable skills

Stack

PlatformVS Code extension (1.115+)
CoreTypeScript
PrivacyFully local analysis — no data leaves your machine
CoverageCopilot, Claude, Codex, OpenCode session logs

Microagents Framework

GitHub ↗  ·  ★ 775

An experimental framework for dynamically creating self-improving agents that learn across chat sessions.

Highlights

  • Self-improving agents that create and validate themselves
  • Persistent agent storage with learning across sessions
  • Parallelized agent creation with validation 'Judge' phase
  • 28 pretrained agents included for various tasks

Stack

CorePython with OpenAI LLMs
EmbeddingsOpenAI Embeddings
StorageSQLite for persistent agents
UI OptionsCLI (Textual) & Web (Gradio)

Monaco Copilot Demo

GitHub ↗  ·  ★ 46

Sample implementation of AI-assisted code editor with intelligent suggestions, validation, and chat integration for web IDEs.

Highlights

  • AI-powered code suggestions triggered via keyboard shortcuts
  • Real-time XML validation with error highlighting
  • Integrated chat for code assistance and debugging
  • Custom theming support for Monaco editor

Stack

EditorMonaco Editor (VS Code engine)
AI BackendOpenAI GPT-4 API
FeaturesCode completion, validation, chat
BuildWebpack, Babel, ESLint

SlideFinder

GitHub ↗  ·  ★ 8

Search & build custom decks from Microsoft Build & Ignite presentations using multi-agent AI workflows.

Highlights

  • Semantic search across 10,000+ conference slides with AI-powered retrieval
  • Multi-agent architecture (Architect, Critic, Judge) for intelligent deck building
  • Automated PPTX generation merging slides from multiple presentations
  • Natural language deck creation - describe your topic, get a draft deck

Stack

BackendFastAPI, Python 3.11+
SearchAzure AI Search (Agentic Retrieval)
AI FrameworkMicrosoft Agent Framework
Processingpython-pptx for slide extraction

Recent Writing

Thoughts on AI, cloud architecture, and building intelligent systems

Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug
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Jun 9, 2026 One Window Is All You Need May 23, 2026 A Data-Driven Approach to Agentic Engineering Apr 4, 2026 Recursive Language Models: When Your Agent Explores Data Like a Developer Feb 22, 2026 When Your AI Agent Has Admin Rights – Defense in Depth for Autonomous Copilots Feb 21, 2026 Building an AI Copilot That Plans, Remembers, and Calls You on the Phone Jan 20, 2026 Deep Research on your own data with Microsoft Foundry Jan 12, 2026 Stop Micromanaging Your AI with Ralph Jan 7, 2026 How to Effectively Use Opus 4.5 in Copilot Dec 15, 2025 Building an AI-Powered Slide Discovery Tool with Microsoft Agent Framework Oct 15, 2025 Environment Engineering: Platform Engineering for AI Agents Sep 18, 2025 Agent Routing with Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft Purview Aug 11, 2025 Building AI Agents That Users Trust Aug 5, 2025 Agentic Web Crawling & NL2SQL with Microsoft Fabric's Data Agent Jul 20, 2025 Document Your AI Agents Like Code: A GitHub Template for A2A Agent Inventories Jul 14, 2025 The Future is Composable: Building Interoperable AI Systems with MCP and A2A Protocols Jul 5, 2025 Databricks-SQL at Your Agent's Fingertips via MCP in GitHub Copilot Jan 5, 2025 Build Tools, Not Prompts – Extend GitHub Copilot with Task-Specific Agents Jan 4, 2025 You Can Now Connect Your Own Model for GitHub Copilot 🤯 Jan 3, 2025 Document Creation with AI Agent Workflows Dec 9, 2024 Generating Easy-to-Understand Changelogs for Document Revisions Oct 19, 2024 Building an Interactive Text-to-Podcast Experience with GPT-4o Real Time API Jun 30, 2024 Elevating RAG with Multi-Agent Systems Apr 10, 2024 Integrating AI-Powered Coding Assistance into Your Custom Web IDE Feb 18, 2024 Chat with Your Photos: Revolutionizing Asset Cataloging with GPT-4 Vision Dec 30, 2023 Integrate PromptFlow into a CI/CD pipeline (On-Agent) Oct 30, 2023 Relevance and Recency in AI Apps Aug 13, 2023 The Journey of Crafting an AI Chatbot Jun 24, 2023 11 Tips to Supercharge Your Pet Projects on Azure Kubernetes Without Emptying Your Wallet! Jun 8, 2023 Azure API Management: Validating Multiple OIDC Issuers for a Single API May 18, 2023 Azure OpenAI with APIM 🕵️ Mar 19, 2023 No Humans Needed: How ChatGPT Builds Apps Without You Feb 27, 2023 Exploring the Capabilities of Large Language Models: Analyzing Unstructured Text 🕵️ Jan 22, 2023 Running a window manager on top of WSL2 Jan 1, 2023 Building a Unity game in one day using ChatGPT and DALL·E 2 Dec 4, 2022 Some Experiments with ChatGPT Dec 1, 2022 Accessing ARM preview features in Terraform Oct 30, 2022 Application Insights for Java Applications: Triggering Profiling Sessions Automatically Oct 1, 2022 Setting App Configuration Values with Special Characters using Azure CLI Sep 1, 2022 Spinning up a temporary desktop environment within GitHub Codespaces Aug 1, 2022 Using Selenium within GitHub Actions Jul 1, 2022 Using an iPad for Coding Jun 1, 2022 Reading From Sheets During a Batch Job May 1, 2022 Lessons learned from moving to linux-arm64 Apr 1, 2022 Extract named entities using Azure Cognitive Services Mar 1, 2022 Annotate pictures using imagemagick Jan 12, 2022 Log4j Vulnerabilities and Apache Karaf (CVE-2021–44228) Dec 12, 2021 How to Upgrade log4j Mar 4, 2018 Himawari-8 Live Background in i3 Dec 21, 2017 Looking Glass Jun 1, 2017 Upscale Photos using Neural Enhance online Apr 30, 2017 Flexible Webservice Orchestration on Talend ESB using Apache Camel's Content Enricher Functionality Mar 17, 2017 Pushing Data to Elastic Search in Apache Camel Jan 20, 2017 Visualize Talend Service Activity Monitoring using SAMvisual Dec 29, 2016 Is Magnolia-CMS the right fit for Microsites? Dec 20, 2016 RescueBomb – A multiplayer Bomberman/Rescue the princess game Dec 11, 2016 Reviewing SSH Activity using Elastic Search / Kibana Nov 10, 2016 Orchestration on Talend ESB using Apache Camel & Apache CXF Jul 14, 2009 Eclipse as a Firefox / Thunderbird Extension IDE