Relative to your interests, Tuesday

The above is an excerpt from the interview with Caleb about platform as a product. He’s been on that scene since the beginning, starting at State Farm. I updated our platform as a product paper recently, so it was fun to ask him “do people still do this stuff”?

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Watermark Away, Baby – Software Defined Talk #586 – “This week, we discuss the unsung genius of Apple Pay, AI watermarking, and why digital transformation fails without a crisis. Plus, D&D Beyond’s secret character API.”

Related to your interests

• Young US adults are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs – “Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026.”
• “Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:” Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit – “Beyond this being a highly interesting case on its own merits, it shows that ChatGPT transcripts can be obtained by opposing lawyers in discovery or during depositions. Moye said ‘every lawyer needs to make sure their own experts aren’t generating work product in a way that’s insincere, and then knowing you can subpoena the prompts (…) I’ve got lawyers all over the place saying, 1) ‘Holy shit, man. How did you get the prompts?,’ and 2) ‘How many cases do I have where this is happening to us?””
• Text Watermarking – How AI watermarking works.
• AI Bottlenecks – Things they slow down AI growth, or, why those tokens are so expensive.
• AI productivity gains aren’t translating to IT workload relief – “Respondents said they have used AI in their work for an average of roughly 15 months. AI gains are materializing, but IT professionals say workload reductions aren’t keeping pace. Teams reported saving 2.7 to 3.3 hours weekly across core tasks, yet 71% of respondents said their overall workload has stayed the same or increased.” // Elusive Enterprise AI ROI.
• How teams build – “Perhaps more intriguing is the makeup of that adoption, and how it appears to be blurring roles. Senior leaders are doing more of the hands-on IC work, adopting AI aggressively to help them do it, and non-engineers are committing code. The suggestion that everyone in an organization is becoming a ‘builder’ seems to be directionally true.”
• Your coding agent got the onboarding your developers never did – “before you tune the tone of your next prompt, look at the AGENTS.md file your team wrote this quarter, and ask why the onboarding doc for your newest hire still doesn’t exist.”
• Reframing the AI-native SDLC in terms of stewardship boundaries – “To make AI agents succeed, we must inject very clear, tightly constrained context. This is where the platform patterns we popularized in Team Topologies become essential. A well-designed internal platform acts like a ‘vending machine,’ providing self-service, reliable access to clean data, APIs, and operational capabilities. By reducing cognitive load on human teams and narrowing context window requirements for AI agents, these platforms create the clean environment that both humans and machines need to execute safely and effectively.”
• 🤖 Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same – Personalisation produces sameness rather than niches because minimising prediction error means hedging toward the conditional mean, and the resulting world then validates the prediction. Evidence from London high streets, Billboard lyrics, MovieTweetings concentration, and synthetic personas; the fix is a mandated exploration floor of about twenty percent, since a token discovery tab does nothing. // Or: I think that’s ugly.
• What’s the Difference between Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) & Agent Experience (AX)? – SEO for AIs is still weird.
• IDC White Paper: Self-Service Private Cloud as the Engine for In-House AI and Application Innovation – “On average, 49.9% of organizations’ AI workloads already run on-premises or in a private cloud. Nearly 30% of organizations have repatriated more than a quarter of their total workloads from public cloud to on-premises infrastructure over the past 12 months. The top drivers for this repatriation are the integration of AI capabilities that require on-premises execution (39.6%), followed by control over data security and privacy (30.3%), and IT governance requirements (26.1%).”
• Bridging the IT Chasm: A Strategic Blueprint for Platform Engineering 2.0 – Using VMware’s private cloud stack, VCF, to make a usable platform with Kubernetes.
• PostgreSQL for Everything – One database for all uses.
• In Deep Ship – “If we map it, again, you can see the two arms of White Empire stretching over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to draw resources and labor in. This was the point of colonialism, reaching the 50% of population that lives within the Valeriepieris circle. That’s why they kept discovering ‘Indians’ everywhere and never corrected themselves.”
• Looming wave of inheritances will further increase inequality in Dutch housing market – “Van Bruggen pointed to figures from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), which show that the richest 10 percent of Dutch households own over 56 percent of the total wealth of all households. There is also a significant divide between homeowners and rental households. In 2024, the average net worth of a renter amounted to €40,400, and that of homeowners amounted to €563,800.”

Upcoming Talks

• Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, 21 September. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, 24 October. Keynote, title to come.
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 November. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

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