Also: Spring still number one, KubeCon AI workloads, the end of Doctor No, and a buyer’s market for employees.
Spring still king, from The State of Java 2025, JetBrains. Related to your interests 🤖 From Red Hat OpenShift to VMware Cloud Foundation 9: A Journey to a Unified Cloud Operating Model - A defense-industry case study describing a migration from OpenShift running on vSphere to VMware’s native Kubernetes stack (VKS + VCFA + VCF 9), framed around operational consolidation and TCO reduction.
Posts in "links"
Five Disneys, Conviction Collapse, and sk8erboi2006 - Related to your interests, Tuesday
Also: local models worth running, Susan Sontag on list-making, GraalVM as thriller novel, and the slow ROI of children.
The Prodigal Daughter (1903), John Collier. Via New Cartographies. Related to your interests Recommended local models - “I’ve experimented with the following models and have found useful applications (mostly around chat, MCP and coding) with all of them: gpt-oss-120b; Qwen3-Coder-30B; GLM-4.7-Flash; MiniMax-M2.5; Qwen3.5-35B-A3B” On Critical Thinking in a Multi-Model World - Getting the AI to be helpfully disagreeable, thus, engaging and truth-finding rather than satisfying.
Hot modems, dinergoths, the platform bottleneck, and the SaaSpocalypse - Related to your interests, Monday
Also: sovereignty’s control plane, 81,000 people tell Anthropic what they want, Google sells its fiber, and oats for the sparrows, and cake
Related to your interests My pal Adib Saikali wrote up an MCP security guide covering how to think about securing MCP servers in the enterprise (no lead-generation required, just a straight-up PDF download). It gets into access tiers (open, group, and user-level servers), authentication with OAuth 2.1, identity propagation models (when to use service accounts vs.
Using AI to help with SRE, ops, etc.:
The problem, he said, is that Claude “will get wrong correlation versus causation.” It’s like a new joiner on the team, they will think “oh, it’s a capacity problem, when actually you lost your cache.” “This is why we can’t trust LLMs for incident response,” said Palcuie. The problem is its inability to “step back and start discerning between causation and correlation… For us humans, it is hard as well.”
And:
The Jevons Paradox, said Palcuie, is “the favorite paradox in the AI industry. It’s when technological improvements increase the efficiency of our resources used, but the resulting lower cost causes consumption to rise rather than fall.”
In the case of software, “it’s easier to write software, so we write much more of it, so the complexity goes up and not down, which means things break in more interesting ways, which means more incidents, more on call… all the improvements in the tooling will be cancelled by this ever-growing complexity.”
From: Fixing Claude with Claude: Anthropic reports on AI site reliability engineering
When Developer Workflow Discipline Isn’t Enough thectoadvisor.com/blog/2026… Selling cross-silo enterprise infrastructure stuff is very difficult:
These are platform engineering objections. And they’re coming from a team the vendor never talked to. Because the vendor optimized their story for developer adoption. They have research that tells them developers love this. What they don’t have is a conversation with the platform team that has to decide whether this can actually be operationalized inside a real enterprise environment."
It’s pretty much always devs versus ops in enterprises. They need organizational therapy from the top, and then the tools.
Related to your interests, Monday
Potsdamer Platz bei Nacht, Paul Paeschke, ca. 1929. Related to your interests Why your DIY Kubernetes stack won’t survive the era of agentic AI How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.
Management is always eager to "reduce costs."
The real story lies “in collapsing headcount growth expectations, from 6% in 2025 to just 2% in 2026 with just 21% of CFOs planning staff increases of 4% to 9%, down from 31% last year,” Nauman Abbasi, vice president analyst in Gartner’s finance practice, said in the release. “This marks a structural pivot from labor expansion to optimization driven by automation and AI that deliver productivity gains without proportional increases in headcount.
Attention, Autonomy, and AI in the Critical Path - Related to your interests - February 17th, 2026
From “CEO said a thing” journalism and sovereign payments to product teams in code-gen land, Deming vs. OKRs, sex recessions, Neanderthals, fonts, and hype cycles - a tour through power, productivity, and what actually holds systems together.
If OpenAI fails, the most likely mode is the Yahoo path: not a dramatic collapse but a slow fade into irrelevance through a thousand mediocre product extensions. ChatGPT becomes a utility everyone uses but nobody pays premium for. Enterprise goes to companies with better compliance stories. The consumer product goes ad-supported. Revenue grows but margins compress. The valuation becomes unjustifiable. They never die – they just stop mattering.
Proof of value lies in the results. To date, more than 90% of the top 10,000 VMware customers have purchased VCF, including nine of the top 10 Fortune companies. Leading companies such as Audi, ING Bank, Lloyds Banking Group and Walmart are adopting VCF and deepening their partnerships with Broadcom. Broadcom’s own internal IT teams have adopted this technology and a cloud operating model to consolidate datacenters and toolchains while improving overall system reliability, improving time to provision applications and infrastructure, and decreasing costs. Most important, the number of workloads managed by Broadcom IT increased during this private cloud transformation."
🔗 One Platform for All Workloads - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog