AI Pees in the Pool, Permanent Indenture, and the Metric Fuck-Ton - Related to your interests, Monday | Coté

AI Pees in the Pool, Permanent Indenture, and the Metric Fuck-Ton - Related to your interests, Monday

May 25, 2026

Also: does anyone actually use microwave food-buttons?

Folk-art figure of a man in traditional Iberian costume - white blouson sleeves, embroidered scapular with a chalice motif, floral red headscarf - holding wooden castanets aloft in each hand with colorful tassels. — Castanet handler.

Platform Engineering in the Age of AI: Why Operational Complexity Is the New Bottleneck - “while coding is becoming cheaper and faster, operational complexity hasn’t disappeared” // Day 2 operations is always the bottleneck. // Also included is the current Syntasso/Kratix pitch.
🤖 Five takeaways from Michael Dell’s keynote at Dell Technologies World 2026 - “Dell’s most direct strategic move was to counter the idea that AI belongs primarily in the public cloud. Citing Dell research, Michael Dell said that ‘67% of AI workloads already run outside the cloud’ and that ‘88% of respondents are running at least one AI workload on prem,’ arguing that ‘CIOs are aggressively pivoting to hybrid AI.'” // Summary
Gartner Forecasts Worldwide AI Spending to Grow 47% in 2026 - “Worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% increase year-over-year, according to Gartner” // At that level, it’s kind of incomprehensible, so just file it away as “a metric fuck-ton.”
Gartner Survey Finds Sales Organizations That Provide AI-Enabled Next Best Actions Are 2.6x More Likely to Achieve Commercial Growth - For better AI ROI: (1) train staff on how it works, (2) have the AI suggest what to do next, i.e., drive a decision, not just inform, search, and context.
You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs - “I’ll get straight to the point: your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.”
Just aim the cannon correctly - Use LLMs to automate toil and low hanging fruit in the dev cycle. Adding features is fine, but it brings all the extra work and long term maintenance with it.
Prompts are technical debt too
1Password extends OpenAI collaboration with Codex MCP server for just-in-time credential access - I’m thinking this is a general MCP server. Well, hoping.
Laying it on thick - “Besides being plainly rude and dishonest, these messages ‘pee in the pool’ of internet communication, making it more difficult for sincere creators to send authentic emails about their projects, simply by raising the ‘noise floor’ of simulation and bullshit.”
LLMs and Buttondown - AI driving a SaaS funnel, here the email/newsletter service buttondown. Also, an API is an important part. Unlike substack, buttondown has an extensive API. Because of that, I keep eyeing it for my own newsletter list.
The Identity Crisis AI Didn’t Warn You About - “For most of modern history, we’ve invested perhaps 10% of our energy in ‘be’ and 90% in ‘do’. The AI era invites (demands?) something closer to the reverse. That’s not a comfortable shift for an industry that prides itself on shipping, but might be the most important thing we build next.”
AI Rage Is Inextricably Fused With Justified Loathing Of The Extraction Class. ‘Deal With It’ - From the read the room/Picard face-palm files.
Liberty Mutual, Travelers discuss when not to modernize - “We’ve got 70% of our compute in the cloud.” // “‘You want to modernize what’s in the critical path,’ said Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP and chief technology and operations officer at Travelers, speaking on the same panel. ‘We’ve chosen to not modernize some things and actually isolated subsystems behind APIs and then invested around it where the customer value or productivity was.'”
Nobody is destined for greatness.
Tyler Cowen: Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse. - This reads like the ultimate Cowen-Straussian piece, i.e., something like: look at us now, with the world on fire…oh to be back in the days when all we debated were pronouns.
What matters - “widely accepted reading of the-west-wing, as such, is that of a liberal Fantasia, not because it depicts the Bartlet administration as being liberal, but because it depicts a world in which the best possible thing you can do is to try very hard to do the right thing - and the liberals, or really the centrist-leaning Democrats, are the ones who do that.”

Wastebook

“synthetic text extruders” world war web.
“Then someone discovers firmware in a soldering iron and the whole IoT farce comes back into focus.” Here.
“My most successful writing comes from when I have a breadcrumb into a maze that I can follow to its logical conclusion” maelstrom.
“Humans are supposed to just walk past an aisle of candy bars?” Wegovy
“My family. My friends. Fun.”
Does anyone use those food-based buttons on microwaves and air fryers? I never do. A knob of power/degrees and then a knob of how long is always faster and reduces cognitive load.

AI Summaries

I wanted to get the ideas here, but did not want to read them. So the robot did.

ICYMI

How many quadrillions in a Googol? - Software Defined Talk #573 - “This week, we discuss Google I/O, the OpenAI soap opera, and ChatGPT going full financial advisor. Plus, thoughts on improving the conference hallway track.”
trying your best properly rated
AI backlash, from the read the room/Picard face-palm files.

Logoff

That’s a big build-up above.

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.