Also: AI for city planning agents, the silent revolutionaries, and the AGENTS.md smell test.

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Let’s go to Buc-ee’s – Software Defined Talk #577 – “This week, we discuss the Fable ban, SpaceX’s $60B Cursor acquisition, and why Lovable wins when AI picks your stack. Plus, Europeans are at the World Cup and already drank Boston dry.”
• Securing Spring with Tanzu Spring – Tanzu Catsup

Related to your interests

• The Platform Imperative: Why AI Readiness Starts with Enterprise Infrastructure – “Fifty-seven percent of enterprise IT teams surveyed said that their top modernization approach right now is adding AI capabilities to existing applications.”
• AI Doesn’t Have ROI – Latest round-up of elusive enterprise AI ROI, rant mode in 11.
• Where’s the holistic AI productivity data? – “There are improvements to be had there, but they are similar to the bump you get when you finally figure out how to use a spreadsheet properly, or learn how to automate tasks with some simple coding.”
• Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t – Attributing layoffs to AI seems false, a round-up. Plus the usual: app dev is more than coding.
• AI Use by the US Government – The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government.
• Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds – “Per the report, 60% of consumers in the U.S. say that brands that use “AI” in their messaging are a turnoff, and 86% don’t fully trust AI and still want to explore original sources. Notably, 42% of consumers said that AI-generated answers without clear attribution are trusted less than airline fees, confusing privacy policies, and medical bills.”
• Governance: New Strategy, Old Hands On The Wheel … – “Map the last 10 decisions that actually mattered, ones that moved budget, shifted a timeline, or changed who owns what. Where did they really get made, and who was in the room? Hold that against your governance charter. If the two lists don’t match, habit is running your business.”
• Dorset Council tests AI agents to speed up planning applications – Using AI to organize the blizzard of paperwork, etc., needed for building permits.
• If AGENTS.md smells ripe, your code won’t live up to the hype – Some tips on skills and AGENTS.md writing.
• Gartner Predicts More Than 70% of Mainframe Exit Projects Will Fail Due to Overestimation of Generative AI’s Capabilities – “More than 70% of mainframe exit projects initiated in 2026 will fail to produce the intended benefits due to an overestimation of generative AI (GenAI) tooling capabilities, according to Gartner, Inc.”
• The AI tipping point: where enterprise AI runs at scale – “Last year, 56 percent of enterprises used public cloud as the primary environment for production AI inference. This year, that figure has fallen 15 percentage points to 41 percent, while 56 percent of enterprises are now running or planning to run production inferencing in a private cloud.”
• Big Tech And The Trump Admin Want To Make AI Data Center Opposition A Chinese Criminal Conspiracy
• ‘Fix this code.’ The three words that led the U.S. government to ban Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos
• What DOGE taught us about AI and federal workers
• Is Platform Engineering Already Obsolete? – “PE 2.0” // “We are seeing a distinct movement where infrastructure is being reclaimed as a first-class platform concern. In the early days, platform engineering focused heavily on developer experience, often treating the underlying infrastructure as a utility that was managed separately. That is no longer sufficient. To succeed in the AI era, platform teams must have deep control over the infrastructure layer to manage the complexities of modern, agent-heavy applications. This is designed to ensure that platforms can host the next generation of enterprise software without being bypassed by teams frustrated with slow or rigid systems.”
• It’s crunch time for Java modernization
• Broadcom Mainframe Software Analyst Summit: Meeting Enterprise AI At The Customer’s Pace
• iOS 27 Adds Four New Features to Notes App, Including Markdown Copy-and-Paste – Notes is getting closer to being fully markdown aware. Now if they just stored notes or markdown files…
• Developer Relations Is Not (Just) Marketing – “A DevRel capability can make it easier for the other parts of the business to understand each other. The best DevRel teams act as envoys across sales, marketing, product, and engineering, translating business requirements to technical ones and back again while relaying user feedback, building webinars, helping pre-sales, guiding roadmaps, and polishing APIs. The best DevRel teams have impact throughout the organization.”
• Rots your brain
• The silent revolutionaries – Maybe the boomers aren’t the ones responsible. It was their parents.
• Wet thoughts – Words that are wet.
• Storied Colors – “One color a day, told as it ought to be told: with its provenance, its chemistry, and the people who paid for it in poison.” // The backstory of named colors.

Wastebook

• “If Ace were to publish the Bible they’d do it as a Double: on one side War God of Israel, on the other The Thing with Three Souls.” Alternate histories.

AI Summaries

I wanted to read these, but I didn’t make the time, so I asked the robot to summarize them.

• 🤖 Code Goes to Zero, Comprehension Doesn’t: Why the AI Bottleneck Moved to Review, Specs, and the Harness
• 🤖 Kubernetes Becomes the Backbone of AI and Multi-Agent Systems
• 🤖 AI Coding Agents Boost the Feeling of Productivity While Draining the Real Thing
• 🤖 Build-vs-Buy for AI Agents Inverts in One Year as ‘Agent Platform’ Quietly Balloons Into Four Separate Product Bets

Logoff

I finally addressed the newsletter tinkering by moving the blog and home page back to WordPress. Newsletter subscribers got two “test posts”…I’m going to call them. I just had a setting wrong that sent out all new blog posts as a newsletter edition. Now it will be more selective.