Original Content

A few things since last time:

• Kubernetes use rising, large organizations slowest to adapt, not many people train their own AI model or deploy new AI models frequently – my highlights from the most recent CNCF state of stuff survey.

• Enterprise ROI is elusive – maybe ROI is just headcount chopping, not revenue growth and “transformation” – Executives continue to say they don’t know how to measure ROI for AI, and/or that it’s low. Despite that: “Our survey reveals a troubling disconnect: 48% of firms have already cut headcount due to AI.” I round up a few surveys with some link-commentary. Also, here’s an additional link on that topic.

• There was a tech freakout on Wall Street this week. Supposedly, it was because investors feared that agentic coding would damage SaaS businesses. However, by the end of the week, everything was fine. Nothing could have changed for SaaS businesses in ~4 days. This brought down the entire tech market. Obviously, when it comes to AI and tech, Wall Street is making it up as it goes along.

• Here’s the livestream of my talk at cfgmgmt camp. It’s the first time I’ve given my “7 pitfalls to building your own internal developer platform talk.” In case the link messes up, it’s at the 5 hours 38 minutes mark. The talk is based on our paper on that topic.

• Last week’s Tanzu Catsup is about how much you need to pay people to build your own internal developer platform.

• Software Defined Talk podcast #557: This week, we discuss Moltbot (née Clawdbot) taking over, Apple’s new AirTags, and finding Enterprise AI ROI. Plus, the tragic demise of the TV dinner.

• Software Defined Interviews podcast: Spotting talent, getting innovation adoption and driving use, open source, AI, and developing taste – those are the major topics Coté and Andrew discussed this week at the live reading. Also, a framework for creating the perfect burger. This was recorded at cfgmgmtcamp 2026, in Ghent, Belgium. Thanks to the staff for making it happen!

• I’m asked what to do and where to stay in Amsterdam a few times a year, here is a brief recommendation for people who don’t want to stay in the touristy-party part. Plus, there’s links to my other recommendations.

• There’s also some new videos in my TikTok account.

Relative to your interests

If you’re interested in see links daily, check out my weblog.

• If true, this is bonkers thinking: “Wall Street doesn’t understand the reluctance of enterprise CIOs to trust startups with mission-critical data or value the expertise needed to run SaaS reliably at scale as much as the shiny new thing.” I made a little video about the danger with that sentiment.

• Some quotes from platform thought-leaders on buy vs. build.

• How the 1944 CIA Sabotage Manual Accidentally Became Your Software Acquisition Playbook – as always, have less meeting.

• Stellan Skarsgård: ‘Don’t try to be perfect. Tell your children: I’m sorry, I’m a piece of crap, but I love you’ – “I believe that art is important because it allows you to see the world through someone else’s eyes. What language can’t explain, art can.”

• Every data centre is a U.S. military base – A history of US tech companies getting their tendrils onto Canada.

• AI set to boost cloud spending, again – Yes: ”Capital expenditures by cloud service providers are expected to increase by almost 40% in 2026, to nearly $600 billion, according to a report from S&P Global. Last year, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle spent a combined total of $437 billion, a significant increase of 68% year over year. ” But: “Nearly eight in 10 executives believe AI won’t start significantly contributing to enterprise revenue until 2030, according to a study published by the IBM Institute for Business Value. Yet the technology is expected to drive enterprise growth over the next four years.”

• BellSoft bets Java expertise can beat hardened container wave

• 12% of American workers use artificial intelligence in their roles every day – “Meanwhile, some 49% of the US workforce reported ‘never’ using AI in their role” Also, cool chart.

• UX of public restrooms – 3D UX for kids. Not good.

• My time at Amazon, Part I – Becca Selah – “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

• “Someone said ‘you don’t need a Mac mini and those that buy them also have unused golf clubs’ and well I feel seen.” In the SDT Slack.

• A Coxswain on Your Shoulder – AI as executive coach. Primary tip: listen more before you ask questions.

• Big Blue Poised To Peddle Lots Of On Premises GenAI –

• Welcome to the last 18 months of labor-intentive services – “Legacy delivery models focused on bums-on-seats aren’t relevant anymore, and services firms must reinvent themselves to survive. Those who don’t will quickly find themselves obsolete, as 75% of the Global 2000 recently declared in our Pulse Study”

• Deploying Moltbot (Formerly Clawdbot) – Good round-up of Clawdbot/Moltbot.

• Chrome gets new Gemini 3 features, including auto browse – AI sidebar for Chrome. One of the advantages Google has with AI is privacy. They already know everything about me because they have 20+ years of my email. I could hide my life from them if I wanted to, so their AI can scurry around in my life without much more concern. See also the pessimistic view.

• Amazon cuts 16K jobs citing ongoing culture shift – What a kind “culture”…

• Analyst Blog: The New Cloud Playbook – Kubernetes, Private Cloud, and Open Source – Executive-y thinking on using VMware’s Kubernetes distro to build apps.

• Private Cloud Adoption Predictions Driven by AI Workloads – “According to the 2026 IDC Cloud FutureScape, by 2028, 40% of all large enterprises will adopt private clouds for their AI workloads to meet stringent data privacy requirements and mitigate risks of sensitive information leakage to public large language models (LLMs).”

• Architecture Communities: The Hidden Engine Of Enterprise Agility – “Forrester’s research on tech debt doom loops shows what this organic chaos creates: Your architects spend 60% of their time on integration workarounds instead of innovation.” Your transformation programs stall because nobody can agree on standards. Your cloud bill spirals because each team negotiated their own contract.”

• 🤖 How ICE Uses AI to Automate Authoritarianism – ICE knows all. // Also, they’re way into AI generated video.

• Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays – “If your life is going to be 80% Mondays and their equivalents, the design specifications for Monday matter more than the design specifications for your vacation.”

• The State Of GenAI And Consumers For 2026 –

• As agentic AI ascends, companies are grappling with control – “If they can’t generate that experience for the customer, then there isn’t really going to be a sense of loyalty to the retailer. That means retailers face potential disintermediation because AI and the consumers themselves won’t necessarily see strength in your brands.”

• Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam’s clouds and go EU-native – “Fully 61 percent of European CIOs and tech leaders say they want to increase their use of local cloud providers. More than half say geopolitics will prevent them from leaning further on US‑based hyperscalers.”

• Why the forward-deployed engineer is tech’s hottest job

• Gartner Predicts 35% of Countries Will Be Locked Into Region-Specific AI Platforms by 2027

• Social media time does not increase teenagers’ mental health problems – study.

• Americans can expect to live longer than ever, per the latest CDC data – ”newborn Americans in 2024 could expect to live to 79 on average”

• CIOs will underestimate AI infrastructure costs by 30% – IDC: “Global 1,000 companies will underestimate their AI infrastructure costs by 30% through 2027, IDC predicts.”

• The low-code lessons CIOs can apply to agentic AI – Training (for humans) and observing their workflow to understand the apps is important to achieve AI ROI.

• Hype vs Responsibility in Building Fintech Products with AI: By Ivica Djordjevic – System problems with AI; also a list of FSI things AIs are good at, mostly text based things and conversations.

• Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale – Ironically, one of the better examples of why vibe coding is a bad idea.

• The AI Free Lunch is Over – Platform engineers have the tools to prevent run-away AI costs. They’ll need to use them.

• The CIO’s Guide to AI Readiness

• Enterprise Agility with Low-Code, AI, and Platforms

• Codex App – OpenAI’s Claude Code competitor.

• U.S tech backlash grows as countries and startups seek alternatives – Big revealed preferences tests coming up here.

• Related, the investor angle: “Europe is hitting the kills witch on some U.S. tech.”

• AWS destiny: becoming the next Lumen – ‘The real problem is that developers don’t choose AWS anymore (because honestly, given a choice between AWS and a vendor who thinks deeply about developer experience, who would?). They choose Vercel, or Netlify, or whatever their AI coding assistant suggests when they type “deploy this.”’ // Some charts/survey/data would be nice to see here. Still, I hear this sentiment a lot. If it gets into the chatter, true or not, it will have negative consequences for AWS.

• A Perfect Match for Big Data: VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service and Tanzu Greenplum

• MCP Auth made easier in Spring – doing auth in MCP has always been a shit-show.

• The AI Free Lunch is Over – Links to several analyst surveys on enterprise AI.

• Enterprise Architecture Has Never Been Stronger – Soon, we’ll all be enterprise architects. // And, a broader state of the role of enterprise architects.

• AI Slopageddon and the OSS Maintainers – AI generated contributions to open source are meeting the human bottleneck.

• Leaders, gainers and unexpected winners in the Enterprise AI arms race – Survey of mid-market and large enterprises. Lots of vendor ranking, some use cases, and DIY apps versus buying apps.

• Standing at the crossroads – PwC on the difficulties of getting productivity gains from Copilot

• My root claude.md file – An Claude + Obsidian and writing style prompt.

• IT leaders grapple with AI agent sprawl

• The Buyer’s Guide to AI Usage Control

• Good looking new features in Paste: search, OCR for images that shows up in search.

• Beware: Government Using Image Manipulation For Propaganda

• “This is actually a Chicken McNugget.”

• “Large enterprises continue to run a hybrid model for the foreseeable future. After more than 15 years of cloud migration, just over 54% of production workloads have been moved to the public cloud.” IDC, November 2025 survey.

• Enterprises Continue to Leverage Both Private and Public Cloud as Data Grows – “Large enterprises continue to run a hybrid model for the foreseeable future. After more than 15 years of cloud migration, just over 54% of production workloads have been moved to the public cloud.” IDC, November 2025 survey.

• What We Got Right with Cloud Foundry – “None of this means Cloud Foundry failed. Quite the opposite. It solved a critical set of problems so effectively that it exposed the next layer of challenges underneath.” // Likely a shoe-drop in part two…

• TikTok hit with charges of breaching EU online content rules, app may have to change – “The EU charges focused on TikTok’s addictive design which includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system.”

• An Update on Heroku – “Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support.”

Logoff

The link list is becoming a bit silly. Clearly, I need to go back to newsletter a few times a week. I’m more interested in my blog, so I’ve been neglecting this. The newsletter still purports to reach more of you, by a lot than the blog – but, I have no idea how many RSS subscribers there are on the blog – so…yeah. Next week, I’ll try sending out a newsletter each time a do a links round-up on my blog.

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I was at cfgmgmcamp this week, both speaking and recording a live podcast. It’s a good way to open up the year of conferences.