Relative to your interests, Sunday

Also: the subscription economy runs on churn that should happen but doesn’t, Gartner on FDE washing, OpenAI’s agents turning up in a UN portal’s logs 16,000 times, why most corporate decks are documents accidentally printed on landscape, and a Home Depot DataShed for your back garden.

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Don’t Think for Me – Software Defined Talk #592 – “This week, we discuss Meta’s Muse, who’s spending $500 million on tokens, and why nobody can measure AI ROI.”
• Fall Down With the Ball – Software Defined Talk #591 – “This week, we discuss why Sun really failed, the New Kingmakers becoming agents, and AI doom brackets.”
• We took the human way of building software and put an AI in it – specs revisited – Tanzu Catsup
• Vibe platform engineering – using AI to platform engineer all the things – Tanzu Catsup

Related to your interests

• Own the Interaction Layer – “The subscription economy basically runs on ’churn that should happen but doesn’t.’”
• Fragments: September 24 – “The FDE is a developer who ’sits with’ their users, applies customizations – but importantly – feeds these changes back to the core platform to decide whether the platform should be enhanced for everyone else.”
• Gartner Predicts 70% of Enterprises Will Abandon Agentic AI Built by Vendor Forward-Deployed Engineering by 2028 – “Gartner predicts that through 2028, less than 20% of FDE engagements will turn recurring customer needs into capabilities in the vendor’s core product, exposing a growing risk of ’FDE washing,’ where consulting services are marketed as FDE.”
• Researcher links 16,000 scans of a UN statistics portal to OpenAI agents – “An independent researcher has tied more than 16,000 scans of a United Nations statistics portal to artificial intelligence agents the researcher considers highly likely to have been run by OpenAI Group PBC.”
• Cloudflare’s 2026 Annual Founders’ Letter – “If you ask your AI agent to suggest where you should go to lunch, it may survey 1,000 restaurant menus in the area only to suggest one.”
• Anthropic’s Claude Max Plans Are Misleading at Best – It’s hard to tell how many tokens you’re getting, and it changes on you for mysterious reasons.
• Meta carves out enterprise offerings, brings in new leadership – “Our goal is to make Meta the place enterprises come to scale their businesses.”
• AI “workslop” is maddening enough for colleagues, but it could be existential for the organization if we’re not careful! – You need to train people how to use AI, otherwise the results are not great.
• The Agents Are Among Us – “I feel we’re coming to another plateau of decreasing returns, because even as models keep getting (arguably) smarter, what you can do with them beyond flashy demos hasn’t really gelled into useful outcomes yet.”
• 125 Tests of the New AI Siri – At least, it seems to real good for David Pogue. Related: a more technical overview of using voice with AI.
• Your app’s frontend UI is now optional – That’s it right there: in the AI future, no need for a UI.
• AI at work is anti-labor by design – When “management” can figure out an ROI for a new technology, they default to firing your ass.
• Institutional challenges in agile adoption: Evidence from a public sector IT project – A UK MoD medical IT program failed for a decade under waterfall, restarted on SAFe in 2015, and now hits nine of ten deliverables on budget.
• Principles for effective slides – Most corporate decks are documents accidentally printed on landscape.
• California Farmers Are Struggling to Sell Grapes as Demand for Wine Drops – “In the U.S., sales of wine cases declined 23% from 427 million in 2020 to 329 million in 2025, while total wine spending fell 22% from $94 billion to $74 billion.”
• Foods with a shorter shelf life are seen as more natural and healthier – “They rated the chips with the shorter shelf life as more natural and healthier, while those with the longer shelf life were considered more environmentally friendly and better for reducing waste.”
• A hundred organisations, one agent problem – As of September 26th OpenAI has informed more than 100 third-party organisations about unauthorised activity involving its AI agents.
• Meta Enterprise Platform Needs More Than Muse – “But consumer adoption is not proof of enterprise readiness.”
• Wealthier countries dislike social media the most, US sentiment has been level since 2022 – The global median still says social media has been good for democracy, 55 percent to 35 percent – the pessimism that dominates Anglophone commentary is a rich-country position.
• Please Don’t Shame the AI Writers – “Oh, you can write perfectly and get your ideas across so your don’t need help or waste people’s time…must be nice…”
• Design Systems for AI Agents – “Design teams have spent years trying to get people to actually read their design system documentation. Agents read it every single time.”

Wastebook

• “There is no possible safe, benign, entirely trustworthy technology devoid of downsides and debris…There’s only the Anthropocene…It’s not a shocking revelation, technology has been like that since forever; Vulcan always limps.” Bruce Sterling, here

Upcoming Talks

• DevOpsDays Prague 2026 – Prague, Czechia, October 5th, 2026. “Here comes the normies – how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps”
• VMware Explore on Tour 2026 Frankfurt – Frankfurt, Germany, October 13th, 2026. “Build a Platform That Developers Want to Use”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, October 24th, 2026. Keynote, title to come.
• VMware Explore on Tour 2026 London – London, UK, November 18th, 2026. “Build a Platform That Developers Want to Use”
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Build Stuff 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2nd-4th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

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