One quick things up-top: this week (tomorrow!), get an overview and demos of the private AI stack and development frameworks we’ve been working on at Tanzu. Register to check it out online, either live or the recording after the event.

Spy on the DM with Model Context Protocol Servers in Java

Here’s my latest walk-through is writing Model Context Protocol Server tools…to play D&D. Here, I build some slightly more complicated Oracles and show how to do logging. I attempt to get into the mind of the AI by asking it tell me why it’s calling an MCP tool. Claude surprisingly tight-lipped!

While making this I realized that writing good docs is more important than ever when you’re doing this kind of agentic AI programming. Instead of just writing a specification that the AI uses to call your tool (the “MCP Client”), you need to explain the tool to it: how to use it, why you’d use it, even your intentions for it. What’s the point of this tool, what are examples of using it?

That is so much different than how most developers thing of documentation. In fact, most developers don’t think about documentation at all. Most don’t write it, and when you read the docs, a lot is just not good.

So, when you’re writing these little AI tools, start thinking differently about how you document the tools. It’s obvious to say, but easy to forget: you need to explain them as you would to a human, not a computer.

Check out the first video which goes over the basics of Model Context Protocol and builds a simple oracle. You can get the code for all of this in my EasyChatDM repo.

Relative to your interests

• Prompt Engineering Techniques with Spring AI - overview of many prompt engineering tactics and how to do them with Spring, with code examples.

• Model Context Protocol has prompt injection security problems - There’s a lot of security work TBD with MCP. // “The curse of prompt injection continues to be that we’ve known about the issue for more than two and a half years and we still don’t have convincing mitigations for handling it.”

• Google boards the AI agent hype train - A summary of all the boring enterprise worries with AI. Mostly: unexpected costs.

• S&P Global: Generative AI Adoption Surges, but Project Failures Rise - “42% of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives before reaching production.” // Yes, and… there’s an increase in AI projects.

• IDC Publishes New, Actionable AI Research at Annual ‘Directions’ Event - “Currently, 51% of businesses are taking an opportunistic approach to AI, but there’s a significant trend toward more structured and strategic adoption. The research highlights how organizations are increasingly viewing AI as a fundamental transformation of business, operating, and organizational models. Governance, knowledge, and skills are emerging as key elements in implementing AI-driven transformation. Companies are moving beyond ad-hoc experimentation, with about 35% now developing more repeatable and managed AI strategies.”

• IDC Predicts AI-driven Transformation By 2025 - “Key findings from the IDC report include a forecast that 67% of the projected $227 billion AI spending in 2025 will originate from enterprises integrating AI into their core operations.” And: “IDC warns that up to 30% of organizations may reevaluate their GenAI investments if these barriers remain unaddressed.”

• France singles out digital services for EU’s tariff response - ‘“The second response will cover all products, and I want to stress this—services will be included,” Primas said, before listing "digital services, including those provided by the GAFAM," as examples… GAFAM refers to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.’

• Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? - “rather than continuing to treat ADHD as a chronic medical disorder primarily requiring pharmaceutical intervention, it may be more helpful to see it as a situational mismatch between individuals and their environments.”

• KubeCon 2025: Technology Resilience, Sovereignty, And Security In An Era Of Political Change - ”Enterprise maturity is here. As demonstrated by HSBC’s implementation, which handles 600 million hits daily across over 7,000 production services, enterprise maturity is here.”

• Google Cloud engineering chief: that Kubernetes dev experience? Sorry about that… - Sorry about all that complexity. // ‘“McCleod, possibly with at least part of his tongue in his cheek, said. “I also just wanted to kind of apologize for the developer experience in Kubernetes. I think when we open source all this wonderful technology, we also open source some of Google’s internal culture about the developer experience.” It’s not like Google was beating up on outside developers, he continued. Rather it reflected Google itself. “We’re not very nice to ourselves at Google. That’s an afterthought. I made this amazing like, engineering marvel, like, figure out how to use it.”’

• How agentic AI makes decisions and solves problems - ”In 2025, 25% of companies that use genAI will launch agentic AI pilots or proofs of concept, according to report by professional services firm Deloitte. In 2027, that number will grow to half of all companies.”

• JavaOne 2025 Highlights Developer Productivity, Language Modernization - A quick overview of the conference themes and Java-world happenings.

• IDC: The Agentic Evolution of Enterprise Applications

• One year ago Redis changed its license – and lost most of its external contributors

• Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History? - “The structure of rationalist and technocratic thinking incentivizes a flattened historical consciousness. They favor systems over stories. They trust models over memories. They crave optimization, not interpretation.”

• Old Fashioned Function Keys - Ode to function keys, and a reminder that they’re useful.

Wastebook

• “GAFAM refers to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft.” The new FANG. ”During his tenure, he delivered ‘normcore,’ ‘cringecore,’ and ultimately, the end of the ‘-core’ suffix altogether as fashion moves in the direction of something more “boom boom.”” All the great cores.

• “He’s got his own Bobcat for no reason!” “He’s living the dream!” RotL #574.

• “How long does it take to eat a tunafish sandwich in a bathroom stall?” Mythic Quest, s1e6. “Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel.” Post-twitter.

• ”Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.” vibe-check.

• ‘Columnists learn over time that it is unwise to write about one’s weirder foibles because instead of making you more accessible through charming self-deprecation, it can instead make you less accessible because you might seem a hapless feeb or a worrisome creep – such as if you wrote "Hey, you know how sometimes, when you haven’t changed your underpants in a week and a half …. "?’ - Remember to Wipe Carefully

• “As a film maker, you try to solve your money problems with creative new techniques that that look good, but that are also cheap. There’s the battle, but that’s the joy of what we were doing…” Ralph Bakshi on Wizards.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

Racing Toward AI App Delivery with Tanzu, April 16th, online, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th, speaking. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. SREDay Cologne, June 12th, speaking.

Logoff

Next month, at Cloud Foundry Day you can come to an in-person workshop for even more. I’ll be there, going over lessons learned from programming agentic goblins, as well as MC’ing. I also have a talk at Cloud Foundry Day proposing a new marketing plan for Cloud Foundry.