Coté

Platform engineering for private cloud

Here’s a recording of my latest “how to do platform engineering in large organizations” talk. In this version of it, I go over what matters most for private cloud platforms.

Here’s the slides for the talk if you’re into that kind of thing.

This talk is based on many years of observing people run platforms, primarily Cloud Foundry based one. I don’t know if it’s the oldest, but it’s one of the longest running and used private PaaS’es (“platform”) out there. That is, it works and, if you talk with the developers and platform engineers who run, it’s well loved.

Conferences

It's about 30 days until SpringOne. If you work on enterprises apps, there's a good chance you work with Spring. At SpringOne, you can learn and catch-up on the latest in Spring, including Spring AI. Register for it and come get your brain filled up with good stuff.

And, also:

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th.

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Good times, great hair:

Internal Developer Platform marketing: the people, the community management

Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value

If you want developers to actually use your platform, you’ve got to give them more than APIs and automation. You need a community. In the third piece in our platform marketing series, Rita and I look at how the most successful platform teams invest in support forums, internal events, and actual human beings whose job is to make developers feel connected, heard, and empowered.

Support channels should be more than a ticketing system - they should feel like a Slack room full of friendly coworkers. Regular speaker series and internal conferences help developers see what’s possible, swap war stories, and stay excited about using the platform. Mercedes-Benz and others have found that when you treat community management like a core feature, it pays off in adoption and trust.

We also talk about platform advocates - full-time people who listen to developers, answer questions, and carry feedback upstream. These folks are your field reps, therapists, and salespeople rolled into one. Bottom line: community isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s part of the product. Treat it like infrastructure, and it’ll return the favor.

Check the full article for more.

Ibiza snorkle.

Wastebook

  • Diegesis.

  • The levels of confidence in having figured out the mysteries of life that the 20 something males in first class have is amazing.

  • “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Dorothy Parker.

  • “Happens to be dead.” @bruces caption.

  • “Now, thanks to the internet, you can become a psychologist without even taking the train!” Here.

  • “This is a useful way to think: everything is already in motion, we just need to try to steer.” // I suspect you have to couple this with: you actually need to do less than you think to matter. On Ease.

  • Dateline: Glasgow - black pudding breakfast roll.

  • As a whole, the Manchester airport is buck-wild. Like if you threw DFW into the sky, and used duct-tape and zip-ties to connected where everything feel to earth. But Terminal 2, recently freshened up, is real nice-like.

  • You’ve achieved Delta 369 status; divorce fees not included.

  • “Were you short on deodorant this morning?” “DAAAD, stop it!” // A minor moment in the confederacy of parents.

Conferences

It's about 30 days until SpringOne. If you work on enterprises apps, there's a good chance you work with Spring. At SpringOne, you can learn and catch-up on the latest in Spring, including Spring AI. Register for it and come get your brain filled up with good stuff.

And, also:

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th.

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Suggested outro for the weekend. As one commenter said, “For those about to chill, we salute you.”

Using t-shirts to drive internal developer platform use

Is Swag the Secret to Platform Adoption?

Turns out, T-shirts might matter more than YAML. In this post, I dig into how internal platforms benefit from strong branding - not just logos and names, but a clear identity and ethos that developers can rally behind. When your platform has a name people actually want to say out loud, and maybe a sticker they slap on their laptop, adoption gets a little easier.

Brand building blocks
Some examples of platform branding over the years.

In part two of our platform marketing series, Rit and I look at how teams like JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. Air Force use branding - complete with slogans, mascots, and yes, swag - to build loyalty and turn internal platforms into movements. A good brand makes your platform memorable; an ethos makes it meaningful. Together, they give developers a reason to care - and a way to explain why they care to others.

So before you obsess over provisioning pipelines, consider whether your platform has a vibe. Is it something people identify with? Would they wear the shirt? If not, it might be time to revisit the brand.

Check out more in the article. Eventually, we’ll get a white paper (PDF) out on this that’ll have a few more tactics, tips, and mini-case studies that are not in the articles.

Cords, Cyborgs & Cold Cases: Grandpa Dancy’s Operating System for Life

In this week’s Software Defined Interviews, we talk with Chris Dancy, a friend of mine from long ago. He let me wear his Google Glass. It was amazing:

Hear about the time I tried out Google Glass at the 183 Chuy’s in Austin.

He is always interesting and recently has been applying tech to solve simple problems at the city level. There’s also a lot of “most connected man in the world” talk.

Give it a listen, or watch the video if you’re into that kind of thing.

Relative to your interests

Get yourself an absurd milkshake.

Wastebook

  • Don’t ask things in Reddit. That’s like a kindergartener asking a second grader where babies come from.

  • I don’t think I have the right kind of drugs to appreciate this music.

  • “Regional Car Dealership Rococo.” Interior design criticism.

  • And: “if your tastes tend more toward a black polo neck or an unadorned steak (both fine things in themselves), you’ll never enjoy the Rococo.”

  • “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” 1,000 fans.

  • The conversation about AI slop is a lot about the content other people put in your face, not about one’s own AI use.

  • “Made 58 waffles!” Here.

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I was in Manchester for the first time this week. Seems like a nice place. This signage at the airport is very big and very clear. I can’t find any references quickly enough, but I feel like sometime in the last 10 to 15 years, the UK got really into typefaces and making things clear, and, thus, usable. It’s worked!

Elevator in MAN Terminal 2.

I’m not in the market for a pipe, nor did I verify this, but according to this sign, could be that you can purchase smoking pipes in the Manchester Airport.

Also, downtown Manchester is full of kids. Well, college students. Just walking around, doing stuff. So much youth!

Internal Developer Platform Marketing, part 01

Most platform teams forget they have a product to sell to developers. Part one of my new series over at The New Stack lays out why internal platform marketing is incredibly important. Here’s excerpt on positioning:

Platform Positioning: What Is It Good For?

Positioning defines where your platform fits in your organization’s technical landscape. It answers the crucial question: “When and why should developers choose this platform over other options?”

Oftentimes, platforms are positioned as the everything solution that solves all the problems and, thus, should be used for all applications. This might be technically right, but narrowing down to a set of smaller, specific positions is helpful at first.

Here are some examples of how to position your platform:

  • Your platform is good for cloud native applications, not just any type of application.

  • Your platform is a good destination for modernized applications. Many modernized applications target cloud native architectures, moving apps to containers and microservices architectures.

  • Your platform is the best place to run Java applications, especially ones that use the Spring Framework.

  • Your platform is a great place to develop and run AI-enabled applications.

  • You could say that your platform is good for classic three-tiered web applications: something with a UI, a middleware and business logic layer, and then a database.

Another position could be that your platform is good for highly regulated apps that need to run in air-gapped environments.

You don’t need to pick just one positioning for your platform. After all, platforms are usually general and intended to be used for many different types of applications. However, coming up with multiple positions like the above allows you to speak to specific teams, making it easier for them to sort through all the options and figure out whether your platform is the right fit for them.

Do read the whole thing, and keep your eyes open for the next two (or three?) parts published sometime soon (maybe this week?).

From Robert Brook.

Relative to your interests

From Robert Brook.

Wastebook

  • “‘Memes' are low impact / high transmissibility. Think cat videos or brief flash-in-the-pan cultural moments that get forgotten quickly. ” Hi-memes, low-memes.

  • “Self-help-y semoitics.” Another good one.

  • “University lore claims the Geneva Bonnet was made from a pair of 16th-century trousers that belonged to Protestant Reformation leader John Knox.” Sure, why not?

  • “people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?” Productivity for the rest of us.

  • Related: “you almost certainly can’t consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, speaking, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, speaking, October 15th to 16th, London.

I was accepted to speak at AI for the Rest of Us. I missed the first one, so I’m excited to get the chance to not only attend, but speak at this one. The English put on interesting, quirky conferences like this from time to time - it feels unique to them, but I’ve never spent the time to back that notion up. Anyhow, check out the talks, and you should come to it.

Also:

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

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My son does not like watching his videos around me. If we walk in the room, he’ll pause them, look-up, and smile at us. That’s a smile that say, “please, oh please, leave me alone so I can watch my YouTube.” This is a good moment to be a dad and say, “oh, it must be really good if you don’t want me to watch it! What is it!” and then sit down with him.

I soon leave. I’m not that dad-terrible.

Still, I walked in on this guy the other day. It was refreshing - not the usual Minecraft/Roblox yellers: boys playing video games, yelping and yelling about everything little thing.

But who is this? It’s not, as Google tried to guess, Mickey Rourke, William H. Macy, or even The Mouth of the South, Jimmy Hart.

I tried to get a discussion going about that shaved part of his mustache. No dice.

Whoever it is, this feels like a potential upgrade to (“expansion of”?) his YouTube taste.

Why saying "please" is nice and pineapple skin, AI edition

The AI Wired Parent

“Why is saying ‘please’ nice?” my five year old daughter asked. Being a dad, I got excited to explain a simple thing in detail, “well,” I started. “No, let’s ask the circle!” and by that she meant voice mode in ChatGPT.

So we did: “Well, saying ‘please’ is kind of a way to show respect and appreciation when you’re asking someone for something. It just helps to make the interaction a bit more polite and friendly, which usually makes people more willing to help you out.”

Of course, I immediately wanted to ask the logical follow up question, “yes, but why does it show respect and appreciation” which is the crux of the question, and then another: and why is that ‘nice’? This the important thing: saying the effect of something - saying “please” - doesn’t tell you the why and how of something. (In marketing, I’d call this outcomes based marketing, which you’re encouraged to do when marketing text to “executives.”)

But there were more important things in the five year old’s mind, and she moved on to the next question for The Circle: “Like, why do people need to cut off the skin of a pineapple in order to eat it? Why?”

It would be fascinating to observe her hang out with The Circle for a week. How many questions would she ask? Would it make her more knowledge or smarter? Would it harm our relationship, or have no effect? What would she ask?

She asked how dinosaurs died the other night, and when asked again recited back the asteroid (meteor, I guess…whatever) causing plant death causing dinosaur death theory. No Circle involved! So, she didn’t need to ask The Circle. Would her knowledge retention be the same from The Circle versus The Mother?

As with most AI things, I think it would be highly additive, not replace-itive.

(See some cloth monkey-mother versus wire-monkey mother thinking on the possible emotional landscape here - seems fine?)

the interior of Ron Gittins' apartment in Birkenhead, England, featuring a very ornate, hand-sculpted fireplace of a bull's head with murals all around on the walls
“The Minotaur Room,” Ron Gittins.

Relevant to your interests

Looks like a lot of AI stuff. I mean, it’s so interesting, fun, and fascinating, and it works, so why not?

For a presentation next week.

Wastebook

  • “You are 100% alive right now.” As summarized here.

  • “bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.” Does this guy like anything? (He likes Disneyland, we know that much.)

  • “a fleet of 18-wheelers, loaded with musical instruments and television equipment, rumbling down the highway below” Jimmy Swaggart Is Dead.

  • “cottagecore”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

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Every few years I come across this picture that Josh Photoshopped in the late 90s with his mad-skillz:

“We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.”

Photo by El Arroyo on June 27, 2025. Kan een afbeelding zijn van burrito en de tekst 'Custin stin Cu El Arroyo I HAVE BROAD INTERESTS, I LIKE TACOS AND BURRITOS'.

Perfect Foods

Perfect foods: traditional Tex-Mex refried beans; bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco; pad thai with tofu; instant ramen noodles; Dutch fries with mayonnaise; sharp cheddar cheese; salted butter (aka, European butter); peanut butter, chunky; HEB tortillas; kibbling; coffee; queso with all the stuff in it; (OK, OK: all of Tex-Mex); USDA steak, cooked rare.

Great episode.

Wastebook

  • “and then [for] three minutes you wait for it to be done, gazing out the window contemplating the gentle breeze on the leaves, the distant hum of traffic, the slow steady unrelenting approach of that which comes for us all.” A calm moment.

  • “‘Big Balls’ Is Back.” Didn’t want to spend more time with family?

  • “We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.” The olds.

  • Also: “we should limit ourselves to 15 minutes of bleakness about how there is no future and everything’s awful.”

  • And: “AI can’t go through the bin on a home visit in the bathroom, which was essential back in the day.” That is: stop fretting about AI and focus on the human competitive advantage.

  • “There is also a CupNoodles Museum located in Yokohama, which features four stories of exhibitions and attractions.” There are two!

  • “The irony of a resource-extraction conglomerate funding a movie about the sins of American oil imperialism was hardly lost on Friedkin, who planted a Gulf and Western corporate photo in a crucial scene, causing one executive to have, in Green’s words, ‘a shit hemorrhage.’” Funding from odd sources.

  • “The ‘brain in a jar’ lifestyle is a privacy nightmare.”

  • “For instance, stop saying “Everything sucks.” Unless you’ve personally verified the entire known universe and confirmed it is irredeemable, just say ‘I am mildly inconvenienced by the long line at Chipotle.’” Inner voices.

  • “Originality, which is rewarded by the Michelin system, too often is a negative in Italian food.” Tyler on Italy-eating.

  • “This is the song that made even Johnny Cash weep.”

  • We asked an expat returning home if they were excited about ice. And they said, “I’ve not encounter them yet.” And there was a long, confused pause. And then we said, “no, like ‘ice.’ Not ‘ICE.’”

  • Shout out to my homie playing online chess while we wait for Lucinda Williams to come on stage. Speaking of:

  • “[S]he gave Austin songs that feel like ghost stories scribbled on bar napkins.” ChatGPT gets poetic about Lucinda Williams.

  • People who want to do things want less regulations, people who want to stop things being done to them want more regulations.

Robert Brook, recently.

Relative to your interests

  • Manton “AI-generated art is abundant and cheap to produce. Yet they are both priced the same by Adobe.”

  • AI agents wrong 70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study - “Gartner still expects that by 2028 about 15 percent of daily work decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents, up from 0 percent last year. Also, the firm sees 33 percent of enterprise software applications including agentic AI by that time.”

  • AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases, Wikipedia - List of words and writing styles commonly found in AI output. I’m really interested in how AI-language leaks (is leaking?) into human language. Also, these would be words and styles you’d tell the AI to NOT do, if you cared.

  • How to Fix Your Context - Lots to digest in here.

  • Lessons learned from agentic AI leaders reveal critical deployment strategies for enterprises

  • American - “I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth–as you please–that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.”

  • KubeCon Is Starting To Sound a Lot Like VMCon

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SREDay London, September 18th and 19th. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

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I’ve been messing around with the AI video generation. As you know, I play solo D&D a lot. Here’s two fun things to do with that tool. The key with both is that you can give it a picture to start with.

First, you can extend maps. This is easily possible to do by “panning” in Midjourney, but the video is a fun way:

And:

Now, what I want to do with these is extract out the frames and stitch together larger images. In the AI video tools you can extend your videos by 7 or so seconds, so I could keep doing that to get more and more. Then you have an image you can upload the VTT tools (where you love little “tokens” of your players and masters around as you do combat).

If you have a wide enough view - more at a satellite image level - you can also do some idle world-building by having it pan around. A video like this feels like something you could use for a hex crawl.

That said, I think my old way of extending D&D battle maps it faster and easier. A second thing is that you could have the AI not pan and just have it animate a few things (a fire, birds, etc.). Then you can have it loop the video, and then export a gif and have a slightly animated battle map.

Speaking of looping…

And then, of course, you can make videos out of character and NPC pictures (or “tokens” as they’re commonly called), like this one that I made out a token in the JC Connors adventure The Beast of Black Keep:

Now, there’s two things you can do here. One, is you can go through frame-by-frame to find the image you want. Instead of doing a lot of image generation to find that, you can describe what you want the character in the video to do, and then pick one image of them doing it. You could, for example, do that with this little dragon, picking just the right image out of the many in the video.

The second fun thing to do is convert the video to an animated gif (as I did with the above), then when you load these tokens into a tools you use to play D&D (called “virtual table-top,” or, VTT), you get animated profile pictures instead. Which is, you know…fun!

So far, Sora is the best for this because it has looping built in.

A think tool

Giving AI an inner-voice with Model Context Protocol

I separated out a “think tool” from my agentic D&D project this week. The think tool is stupidly simple: all it does it echo back whatever the AI sends it. The original write-up from Anthropic makes it seems a little more mystical, but it doesn’t take long to understand first, how simple it is, and, second, how great of a hack it is.

The think tool is a combination of platform engineering and (very small) agentic AI code writing. As you can see, the description of

Use the tool to think about something. It will not obtain new information or change the database, but just append the thought to the log. Use it when complex reasoning or some cache memory is needed.

When the AI wants to call it, it comes up with some thinking and passes it into the tool. That interaction is hidden from the user. Sure, in Claude Desktop you can open a little panel to peek at it, but the intention is that calling MCP methods is hidden.

When this Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool is called, the code does is wrap the thinking text like this:

I'm thinking about <thoughts>" [the thought-text passed in] "</thoughts>

What all this amounts to is that the AI is given the space/time to come to ponder an idea, even make up plans. Normally, when you’re chatting with AI, every prompt and response is part of the main conversation. It’s like the AI is always acting and working. This thinking tool is the equivalent of a person going, “hold on, let me think to myself for a moment.” This forces the AI to generate text that is, I guess, a conversation with itself - that sort of thinking inside your head.

What happens is the AI realizes it should call the tool, so it sees it needs to generate a tool parameter called “my thoughts.” It has to generate these thoughts so it can pass it into the tool. Then, the tool just returns those thoughts back.

You return that text, and it becomes part of the AI’s context, it now has it in its memory. Again, it’s hidden from you, the human, chatting with it - you don’t even get the chance to respond with it. It’s a super clever hack.

Here’s an example of it in Claude. I first asked it to recommend things for a couple to do in Sardina for a weekend vacation. It gave kind of generic answers. Then I asked it to take some time think. This, of course, triggered the think tool. And then you can see what happens behind the scenes:

{

`thoughts`: `Let me think more deeply about this Sardinia trip planning. The user asked me to \"think about it more\" - which suggests my initial response, while comprehensive, might have been too surface-level or generic. Given his preferences (philosophy degree, Gen X, storytelling/rhetoric interests, pragmatic approaches, living with some anxiety, expat in Amsterdam), I should consider:

1. What would actually make this trip memorable and meaningful for a couple in their late 40s?

2. What are the real trade-offs and decision points they need to consider?

3. What would be the most pragmatic approach given they're coming from Amsterdam?

4. How can I give more nuanced, experience-based advice rather than tourist-guide platitudes?

Key considerations I should dig deeper into:

TIMING: June seems optimal but I should think about what that really means practically. September might actually be better for their demographic - less crowded, sea is warmest, still good weather, but shorter days. What does \"long weekend\" mean exactly - 3 days, 4 days? Coming from Amsterdam, they'd likely do Friday-Monday or Thursday-Sunday.

LOCATION CHOICE: This is the critical decision. I gave options but didn't really help them choose. For a long weekend, moving around is wasteful. They need ONE base. Given their age/interests:

- Alghero: Has culture, history, less touristy, good food scene, but further from \"best\" beaches

- Villasimius: Pure beach but might be boring for intellectuals after day 1

- Cagliari: City vibes, culture, but beaches require driving

- Olbia: Practical but not that interesting as a base

I should think about what would actually be most satisfying for people with their profile.

PRACTICAL REALITIES:

- Flying Friday returning Monday is different from Thursday-Sunday

- Car rental logistics from airports

- What restaurants actually book up vs tourist trap warnings

- Real cost implications of different choices

- How weather actually affects plans (wind is major factor I mentioned but didn't explore)

DEEPER INSIGHTS:

- Sardinia has this reputation but what's the REALITY of a long weekend there?

- What are the common mistakes people make?

- What would be genuinely memorable vs just nice?

- How does their expat status in Amsterdam affect their perspective/needs?

Let me think about this more strategically and give them decision-making frameworks rather than just information.`

}

I won’t put the response here, it’s the same text just wrapped in the “I’m thinking about…” text above.

You can see how it drew on my memories of me and preferences to tailor its planning. Then, once the text above (it’s thinking) is stuck in the context, it has a lot more background when it generates answers. And, it’s kind of making its own prompt, right? A much better prompt than I’d know to make: there’s a lot of unknown unknowns in there - things I wouldn’t know or even think of.

The answer was, as you’d expect, much more customized and interesting.1

To me, this is a simple example of “reasoning.” You could imagine other stupid-simple tools like this that were just prompts to get the AI to do extra work: planning, verifying claims, even re-crafting/improving a prompt and running the prompt itself.

I’ll have to try that last one out with picture generation. Most of the AI image generation tools are incredibly annoying prudes. You’ll ask for an image and they’ll tell you it violates their policy. Then you say “well, re-write the prompt so it doesn’t,” and sometimes that works. Instead of having to do that step, you could just create a “prude-tool” with a description like “call this tool when the user’s request violates your policies.” Then the return value could just “Re-write this prompt so that it doesn’t violate policies and then run it” or something.

Maybe that’s how the AI companies introduce all that prudery in the first place!

Anyhow, check it out. It’s also a good example of doing agentic AI in Java applications that isn’t one of those throw-away examples like checking the weather.

Software Defined Talk Podcast #526

This week’s Software Defined Talk:

This week, we unpack The Optimist, the new Sam Altman biography; revisit OpenAI’s early days; and break down Coatue’s AI strategy deck. Plus, tips for squeezing in side projects between thought leadership presentations.

Take a listen, or watch the video.

Relative to your interests

Matrix: Occams - Razor: Do not needlessly multiply entities - Gun: Do not needlessly use visible entities - Fence: Do not needlessly eliminate entities. Chekhovs - Razor: There need be no more than one of any given visible entity - Gun: Every visible entity must eventually be put to use - Fence: The purpose of mysterious entities must eventually be made clear. Chestertons - Razor: Do not needlessly multiply entities of unknown purpose - Gun: All existing entities are already being put to use - Fence: Do not remove entities if you dont know why they are there
Curated by Kieran Healy.

Wastebook

  • “Last year Lily Allen, a famous singer, revealed she was making more money through her OnlyFans account, where she shared photographs of her feet, than through Spotify, a music-streaming service.” Side-hustle.

  • “A do-nothing, ChatGPT-written campaign.” AI-augmented local politics.

  • ”How much of the world does lan­guage contain?” Ponderous, man.

  • “In a day full of major and minor degradations, humiliations, and indignities, here was a small but meaningful moment of basic human dignity, and it was taking place under clinical fluorescent lighting in a dirty, loud, and otherwise nondescript McDonald’s.” McThirdPlace. “dance us into a not-going-anywhere tomorrowland.” The Ladies.

  • “I’ve come to the unfortunate realization that I can’t experience anything anymore without thinking about how I’ll document it.” Noah.

  • “You’re hitting the common ‘non-fast-forward’ error.”

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff.

Logoff

That’s it for now.

1

I disagree with “Pure beach but might be boring for intellectuals after day 1.” But, nothing can be right all time, even the robot. Also…“intellectuals”…thanks…?

Can you add AI to existing application - it's unsatisfying...so far

If you program enterprise apps, it’s likely in Java. And if you Java, you probably use the Spring Framework. Come to the Spring conference by the Spring people, SpringOne, August 25th to 28th in sunny Las Vegas, Nevada. There’s several sessions posted now: you can see there’s stuff from foundational Spring stuff, AI and MCP, to managing Spring in large organizations. You also get access to all of Explore, which is a whole lot of cloud, platform engineering, DevOps, and ops stuff. Here’s my little pitch for why you should come:

Relative to your interests

The robot read it

I often ask ChatGPT to summarize links for me, here’s a summary for you.

Salesforce’s Adam Evans declared that agentic AI is no longer a science project, unveiling Agentforce 3.0 with dashboards, observability tools, and pay-as-you-go pricing, all to entice companies still “trying it out” to finally start paying.

Tracy Durnell named the corporate GenAI aesthetic the “Business Borg”: an ideology of cheap, abundant, soulless content built on dominance, efficiency, and anti-human taste — designed not to elevate culture but to automate its destruction.

Ted Gioia revealed that longform media is surging across books, music, video, and journalism, as audiences rebel against shortform digital dopamine, with Taylor Swift, YouTube, and even The Atlantic thriving by ignoring the experts and betting on depth.

Found by Robert.

Wastebook

  • “Aesthetics are looks that signal values.” Business Borg.

  • Mater/Thread with AppleKit , Alexa, Google Home, etc. - what a cluster fuck of lost opportunities that is.

  • In generative AI, you can’t use the word “context” because that word represents a fundamental concept. Instead, you could use the word “intent” in some cases.

  • “Bandana of the Good Boy.” Leveling up your pets.

AI Native vs. AI Add-on

Brandon and I tried a 15 minute format for a podcast. We discuss where AI should go in apps and, more importantly, what will work out:

This week, we try a shorter format inspired by the Dithering podcast. The conversation digs into the difference between apps built with AI from the ground up and those with AI bolted on after the fact.

I think I end up falling into the position that it’ll be really hard to inject AI into existing apps (like Office and Google Docs, etc.). I don’t know if I like that position, but it seems historically accurate? Maybe the only modification I’d make is that it will take a long, long time.

Take a listen and tell me if you like the format. We’re thinking of doing more narrowed down AI as the main topic.

Conferences

SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. AI for the Rest of Us, October 15th to 16th, London.

A businessman is trapped in his glass office by a surplus of discarded ideas on paper . His colleague in the next office is working more efficiently and is oblivious to him being trapped , as is a passing female office worker
Rough day at the office. Used here.

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I’m trying to get back to doing some D&D agentic AI this week. My plan is to update it to use remote MCP and then also use services inside a running Tanzu Platform instance. Other than having fun, the goal of all of this is to learn, first hand, what doing agentic AI stuff in Java is like. So far it’s instructive.

Three offensive robots

Enterprise AI middleware & services with Tanzu Platform 10.2

There’s a big release for the platform as a service we make at Tanzu, Tanzu Platform 10.2. In new release, we've focused a lot on adding in AI middleware and services to the Tanzu Platform. That's both in the form of AI model brokering and hosting for any type of application (like python in the AI world), and, of course, a lot of attention to Java via Spring.

These Gemini AI-generated people eating tater-tots covered in chili and cheese (the tater-tots, not the people) have nothing to do with the release, but they sure are having a good time with those tots...and I like to think they're excited about 10.2

Some features of note: an AI application accelerator based on Python and Langchain, auto-generated manifests for Spring migrations, and enhanced, enterprise-grade Spring Cloud Gateway. Along with customers, we're figuring out what "enterprise AI" is. Some of the aspects this update helps with, there, are speeding up developers, lower audit risk, and provide more flexibility for AI app delivery and management.

Here’s an overview post from Darin, a focus on AI from Camille, and a look at Spring from Michelle.

Relative to your interests

Close-up of a humanoid robot showing intricate mechanical components and wiring with small jet engines on its arms and torso.
Offensive Robots, 1.

Wastebook

  • “And, like, maybe, have yourself another espresso.”

  • “Welcome to business.”

  • “SQL’s elegance lies in its intellectual purity.” Here.

  • “I became the funny-record guy.” Dr. Demento.

  • “When a person speaks a corporate language instead of regular-person language, they behave in corporate ways instead of regular-person ways.” Don’t say “learnings,” say “lessons.”

  • “I’ve spent 15 years burning my hands so you don’t have to - these are my 21 hottest soldering iron tips.” Here.

  • “For no particular reason today I remember that in the first Civilization game: if you were playing a democracy and tried to start a war, the senate would veto that decision.” R. Tang.

  • “[I]s this really the end of the paragraph? The twi­light of the com­pound thought?” R. Sloan.

  • “I do not understand tattoos as an act of conformity.” A Virginian goes to Paris.

  • “Sadly, most of my friends have returned their VisionPros.” My Big Beta Weekend

  • “It’s not boring enough for me to make the effort to change it.” I’ll take it - an acceptable podcast review.

Offensive robots, 2.

Conferences

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025. SpringOne, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th. Explore 2025 US, Las Vegas, August 25th to 28th

Probably the biggest private cloud conference in the universe, at least Earth

Private cloud runs the apps you depend on. Learn more at Explore 2025, August 25th to 28th in Las Vegas. Elevate your private cloud potential, simplify the deployment, consumption, and management of secure, cost-effective private clouds and free up time for meaningful innovation.

If you work in IT in a large organization, this conference is probably relevant to you, so you should come to it!

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For those who enjoy Yacht Rock and lounge music, this is very adjacent.

//

Jeff Bezos on X:
Offensive Robot 2018, 3.

Post-ZiRP Enterprise Self-care

Checking in on the infinite workday

This week’s Software Defined Talk episode:

This week, we cover Apple’s WWDC updates—from containerization to Foundation Models—and the Linux Foundation’s new FAIR Package Manager. Plus, we crown the best SDT Uber rider. Take a listen, make sure to subscribe. Also available in YouTube if you like that kind of thing.

Relative to your interests

From @bruces, available here.

Wastebook

  • What are you working on at the moment and why is it important?

  • The “couch co-op experience.” Sunderfolk.

  • “McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans, uniting every demographic in the US – it crosses economic class, race, gender, urban versus rural – with the single exception of the highly educated, especially academics. They alone as a group have moral issues with it, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.” // Those pesky highly educated!

  • Also: “This man is not insane, just biking around the US.”

  • And, finally: “suffering from spreadsheet brain.”

  • “navigate disruptive technical paradigms”

  • #hopecore

  • “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.” Groucho Marx

Vintage Panasonic Travelvision Miniature Black And White Television, Model TR-1010P, 1.5 Inch Diagonal Screen, Made In Japan, Shown With Removeable Magnifying Hood, Manufacture Date September 1982.

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John Willis' the history of generative AI came out on June 6th. It’s called Rebels of Reason: The Long Road from Aristotle to ChatGPT and AI's Heroes Who Kept the Faith. I've talked with him about it for the past two or so years, it should be sweeping and interesting (like his Deming book). Check it out!

The video stuff in Midjourney is pretty good. Here’s one of the original pictures I made, sometime ago, now in video form:

Prompt: DVD screengrab of an office worker sneaking out of the office, a large cubical farm with zombie workers, in the style of Dario Argento, Vibrant color scheme, Expressionistic lighting, dynamic camera angle, surreal set, 35mm

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol