Author: Coté
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How I tell AI to write in my style, other people’s styles – and how to strip out shitty AI talk and LinkedIn language
An agent skill to remove AI writing tells, LinkedIn style, and write like Coté.
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How people use AI in 2026: TV, homework, the DMV
Google looked at 15 million Gemini conversations and found people mostly asking about TV, homework, and government paperwork. Work is 13.5% of it, and almost none of that is trying to automate anything. Also: what the study leaves out, which is most of enterprise AI.
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Not my mistake, now my problem
I’m often told infrastructure people don’t care about developers and platforms. But whatever your developers build above your infrastructure is a platform and they’ll soon flit away from it, and now for you it’s: not my mistake, and now my problem. There’s more in the full talk Oren and I gave recently, Oren goes over…
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Relative to your interests, Thursday
The return of the 3 R’s!!! These were the best R’s. – “A decade ago, Pivotal published a security manifesto, a radical call to action of sorts, via a blog post that broke the glass of traditional security culture inside of enterprise IT. The premise was faster is safer, a radical departure from the calcified,…
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Relative to your interests, Wednesday
After reading many of the below and other links in elusive enterprise AI ROI, I wrote this theory on how to be successful with enterprise AI projects. It’s the usual “culture” cliché, but hopefully a little more practical than usual. Are PMs becoming irrelevant? – Once you remove the need for a bunch of “paperwork,”…
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AI won’t fix your broken culture, but you can fix your broken culture
AI amplifies what you have: good processes get faster, bad ones get worse. Getting real enterprise AI ROI means changing how you work – structure, focus, scope.
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Young people are cheaper and complain less
Yes: The company has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October. But: Amazon, he noted, is hiring 11,000 interns and new grads this year. Resulting business value: And when you talk about entry-level jobs, number one, they’re your cheapest employees. They haven’t learned bad habits. You can teach them the culture, they’re willing to…
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AI is good at bullshit work, find ROI there
One company encouraged widespread vibe-coding from citizen developers but recoiled from the problems of the huge shadow IT that emerged – they are now looking to build a platform to help control this work without stifling the useful tools that were produced. Part of the problem here may be simple experience with LLMs. Many in…
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Relative to your interests, Tuesday
I have been on vacation for a little while, in Finland for the third time. Finland feels different than the other parts of Europe I have been to. Perhaps it’s because I spent my time there in rural Finland. But it also feels like most of Finland is rural. In that way, it feels a…
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private AI in banking
Developing the secure data layers needed for large language model (LLM) use cases. Because its AI compute and data storage operate within the same strict perimeter, the credit union can confidently leverage highly sensitive member data. This makes Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) easy to implement while keeping member information completely isolated from public APIs. 🔗 USSFCU…
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short feedback loops always works
Using short feedback loops to experiment and direct software development is always a good idea, especially with AI: What survives from Agile is the feedback logic. Short cycles still matter. Thin vertical slices still matter. Customer or stakeholder review still matters. Working software is still better than progress theater because agents can generate a lot…
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Employee avoiding AI, doing manual work instead
A new global survey of 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries, conducted by SAP subsidiary WalkMe for its fifth annual State of Digital Adoption report, finds that more 54% of workers bypassed their company’s AI tools in the past 30 days and completed the work manually instead. Another 33% haven’t used AI at all.…
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AI won’t fix your broken culture
Expecting AI to improve dysfunctional parts of your business probably won’t go well: The strongest candidates are workflows that repeat at meaningful scale, have clear ownership, and can be measured for quality, risk, and business value. 🔗 How to manage AI investments in the agentic era
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Writing for LinkedIn, Ford’s Gray Beards, and Nvidia the Lottery Winner – Related to your interests, Wednesday
Also: harness engineering teams, the Mario meeting, LinkedIn engagement data, and one million passports. By Robert Brook ICYMI From the blog since last time. DIY Platform – don’t do it – my presentation at PlatformCon 2026. The Headless Lifestyle – Software Defined Talk #579 – “Anthropic’s 18-day Fable timeout, whether AI is actually killing jobs,…
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find your customer
Compensation theater: Everyone cares about the compensation (base salary, bonus, and stock). That’s the data they care about, but where did this pile of compensation come from? Who decided how big it is? And how is it allocated? It is a long, complicated, and large process that began over a year ago. Every meeting I…
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why big companies build their own software, and hire consultants to do it
But selling anything to big enterprises is hard. You are asked to meet with a dozen people in the organization, spending hours and hours trying to explain and persuade. Half the people you meet with are skeptics who are going to argue that your service won’t work. The other half are going to argue internally…
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here come the normies
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing “soaring token spend,” according to the audio. To consider: There is a…
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Harness engineering is the new DevOps
Are we going to see harness engineering teams? Yes: these are already emerging. It’s too early to say, but that feels wrong in the same way that DevOps teams were a misunderstanding of DevOps-the-movement. My belief is that while there is friction in having every team create their own harness, that friction is generative and…
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training your replacement
Yes: the work is moving from writing code to specifying, verifying, and curating knowledge. But: the code is the better spec. Their point: code is the only artifact that’s unambiguous, executable, and – this is the big one – deterministic. A prose spec is fuzzy and an agent will interpret it a little differently every…
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potential fatigue
The old system said: ‘Obey.’ The new system says: ‘Realize your potential,’ which can be a much crueler thing because potential’s infinite, and people, last time I checked, are not. There’s no stopping point in an achievement society. ‘Potential’ is the modern world’s term for whatever you haven’t done yet and, frankly, should already kinda…
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