This episode: AI is coming for your software job, or at least for the parts of it you actually enjoyed. Meanwhile, businesses are still stuck in pilot purgatory with generative AI, IT leaders remain unconvinced of AI’s ROI, and Java is apparently coming for Python’s AI crown. The economy may be changing not because of interest rates or labor shortages, but because everyone is drinking more water and eating fewer snacks. Also: MP3s are free, remote workers may be getting pay cuts, Kubernetes vs. Serverless, and a reminder that laws are now a gentlemen’s agreement, and we are not ruled by gentlemen.

Relative to your interests

• You Didn’t Notice MP3 Is Now Free - The MP3 format, once a staple for digital audio, is now free due to expired licensing. However, its significance has diminished with the rise of streaming services and faster internet speeds, making file sizes less of a concern. While this change is notable for developers, the general population is largely unaffected by the shift away from MP3.

• When will remote workers see their pay cut? - This sort of like paying people in different regions different salaries for cost of living. Of course, it doesn’t address the actual question: does WFH vs RTO actually have an effect on business success?

• LinkedIn revenue: ”Microsoft’s bottom line — the division delivered $16 billion in revenue in 2024, more than The New York Times, Zoom, and Docusign put together.” Sherwood.

• Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently - “Reflecting on the ROI of marketing efforts I’ve done recently: Print isn’t that useful unless it’s with a writer with a voice (e.g., a substack). Audio and video really make an impact. You want to be inside someone’s EarPods. Speaking at trade shows is helpful in expanding your network”

• Kubernetes vs. Serverless: When to Choose Which?

• After 30 years of code, Java remains an enterprise cornerstone - ”Nearly 7 in 10 respondents reported more than half of their organization’s applications run on Java. Roughly half are now leveraging the programming language to build AI applications.”

• 2025 Is the Last Year of Python Dominance in AI: Java Comin’ - Asked if he believed Java could overtake Python for leadership in AI development, Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, told The New Stack: “Yes, definitely, this could happen, especially since Java is unparalleled for the development of enterprise-grade, mission critical applications at scale.”

• How real-world businesses are transforming with AI - with 50 new stories

• Stuck in the pilot phase: Enterprises grapple with generative AI ROI - “More than 90% of leaders expressed concern about generative AI pilots proceeding without addressing problems uncovered by previous initiatives, according to the Informatica report. Nearly 3 in 5 respondents admitted to facing pressure to move projects along faster.”

• IT decision makers unconvinced of returns from AI investment - “Nearly half of respondents have yet to adopt AI at all, with 36 percent indicating they plan to start using it within the next 12 months, while a further 13 percent are still at the stage of considering or evaluating it but have no plans yet.”

• 70s Sci-Fi Art - Good newsletter, lots of great styles.

Wastebook

• “It’s bedtime again in America.” Among many more clever phrases.

• “Broligarchs.” Brooke Harrington.

• “The aphoristic rule of Washington meetings is: The more you know about what happened in it, probably the less fruitful it was.” Politico.

• Plastic straws are a shibboleth.

• “They used to say that the sun will never set on the British Empire because God doesn’t trust the bastards in the dark.” Warren Ellis.

• “Immediately, we were cocktailed to the max. Some of us more than others.” David Plotz, Political Gabest for February 6th, 2025.

• “If you work from home, you may go several days without speaking to another human being, but there are also disadvantages.” Laura Manach.

• “laws have become a gentlemen’s agreement and we are not ruled by gentlemen.” jenn schiffer.

• Great headline: “Bill Gates Says He Donated $100 Billion Of His Wealth For Charitable Causes, But He ‘Didn’t Order Less Hamburgers Or Less Movies.’”

What the robot read

I often ask the robot to summarize articles for me that look interesting…but that I don’t want to read. These are not the summaries, but I asked it to write a Harper’s Weekly Review style summary for you. What do you think?

Sam Altman claimed that AI intelligence scales logarithmically with compute and that costs are falling tenfold each year, which, if true, means AI will soon be as cheap and omnipresent as tap water. Tim O’Reilly argued that AI will not replace programmers but instead turn them into managers of digital workers, much like software has done to factory labor, and that those who fail to embrace AI assistance will be the first to fall behind. A group of researchers suggested that AI-assisted development is most effective when structured prompts are used, such as API simulators that let engineers refine interfaces before writing any actual code.

John Cochrane noted that eliminating taxes on tips may have little impact, since most low-income workers already pay little to no federal income tax, unless payroll taxes are also exempted. Martin Weitzman (1974) explained that when costs are highly uncertain, tax-based regulations, such as carbon pricing, are often more efficient than hard quotas, which may force companies into inefficient or unnecessarily expensive compliance.

John Ganz observed that Silicon Valley billionaires, having built platforms that fueled left-wing activism, turned reactionary when they realized their own workers and user bases were using those tools to organize against them. A DIY survival guide advised that the most effective forms of resistance against an authoritarian regime are often mundane—delaying bureaucracy, documenting history, and making sure that those fleeing oppression have somewhere to sleep.

Cloud modernization efforts continued as businesses struggled with “creaky cloud infrastructures”, with Computer Weekly reporting that legacy IT assets remain a major obstacle to data-driven innovation. The importance of modernization, they noted, isn’t just about performance—it’s also about trust, security, and ensuring that businesses can actually use the data they collect instead of just hoarding it.

Meanwhile, new data suggested that GLP-1 weight loss drugs are rewiring consumer spending habits, with James Dillard noting that purchases of fitness trackers are up 183%, water filtration systems up 28%, and skincare products up 12%. Alcohol sales are down, dried meat snacks are down, and refrigerated salad dressings—perhaps the unspoken victims of shifting metabolic priorities—are down nearly 20%. The new economy may be built not on cheap credit or AI-fueled productivity but on fewer late-night snacks and an obsession with hydration.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, now acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), issued a directive halting the agency’s supervision of non-bank entities, notably shielding Elon Musk’s X from regulatory oversight. This move aligns with Musk’s vision of transforming X into an “everything app,” reminiscent of China’s WeChat. Meanwhile, Amazon announced plans to invest over $100 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure for its cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in 2025. This investment nearly matches AWS’s annual revenue, highlighting the company’s commitment to AI advancement.

In the political arena, President Donald Trump proposed extending the 2017 tax cuts, expanding the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction, and eliminating taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits. These initiatives could reduce federal revenue by $5 to $11 trillion over the next decade, potentially increasing the national debt to between 132% and 149% of GDP by 2035. Reflecting on societal shifts, an essay in The Point Magazine observed that we are told, with increasing frequency, that we are living in a post-feminist age.

In a candid blog post, designer Elizabeth Pape of Elizabeth Suzann discussed the challenges of scaling a self-funded fashion business, touching on topics like pricing, consumption, and the complexities of ethical production.

Logoff

I did a lot of AI stuff above, maybe too much and too long. But, we’ll see. Sorry if it pissed you off. Tell me if you liked it (and want more) or do not like it and want less/none:

I signed up for ChatGPT Pro this weekend. Ben Thompson’s overview of it in last week’s Sharp Tech made me very interested. Since I live in the EU, I can get a refund within 14 days, so that $200/month price a barrier to trying it. So far the Deep Research thing is OK/good. Since it’s going to be moving into the Plus tier (right?), even if it’s limited to some number a month, I don’t think I need to pat $200 a month. Still, it’s been great, especially for making a parent’s guide to helping our kids out with homework.

Writing with ChatGPT and Claude

I’ve been using ChatGPT and Claude a lot for writing recently. I had a long conversation in the car ride between Ghent and Amsterdam with one of my old DevOps pals and they described their AI writing process. It’s best describe it as “layering.” Well, actually, it’s just how writing is always done: incrementally at first, and then iteratively until you run out of time.

Here’s the technique. I’m going to mix together what they told me they do with what I do:

Setup

One does not simply start writing with ChatGPT and Claude, you need to do a certain amount of setup:

• It often starts with asking gpt-researcher to do a big report on whatever the topic is. This gathers all the background and, you know, research in an organized report.

• I don’t use gpt-researcher. Instead what I do is use projects in ChatGPT and Claude and load up as many relevant documents as I can find. I’ll ask ChatGPT to find things on the web - Claude can’t search the web(!). A key part of these projects is also putting in a prompt that says what you’re working on. That way, you don’t have to start each time.

• For writing style and tone, you can create and set a style in Claude. You upload a bunch of your writing (or whatever writing you want it to create a style for) and it figures it out. You can tune the style too, manually or by chatting with it.1

• ChatGPT doesn’t have an easy way to create and drive the style, but there’s a trick you can do. Once you have the Claude style, you can go in and manually edit the style guide it wrote. All you do, then, is copy and paste it into ChatGPT!

• There’s three ways you can take that style guide to use in ChatGPT: (1) just paste it inline in your chat window as you’re working. Say something like “For our writing, use this style and tone: [paste it].” (2) You can set it in the project prompt like “We’re working on writing a guide to using internal developer platform marketing. [Further background]. For our writing, use this style and tone [past style guide].” Since you’re using a project, whenever you star a new chat in the project ChatGPT (as far as I can tell!) starts with that project prompt. (3) You can also tell ChatGPT to remember the writing style by telling it in any chat “remember when we’re writing about technical topics I want you to use this style and tone: [past in style guide].” That seems to work, so far.

Here’s how you find Claude’s style guide:

Writing

Now, with that setup, here’s the writing layering-loop:

• They take the resulting report, in markdown, and give it to ChatGPT to create an outline with key points. There’s some refinement and adding things in. Here, you could use Canvas for some editing. It’s pretty good as we talk about in this week’s Software Defined Talk (video).

• You then take the outline and the text and go to Claude and have it write with you. At the moment, this is key: Claude is creative and ChatGPT is analytical.

• They you take that, make a lot of your own edits, and switch back to ChatGPT for some copyediting. You want ChatGPT to do the “engineering” part of writing, work on the structure and mechanics of it.

• When you’re working with the AIs through-out this, you’re also giving it feedback about what you like and don’t like. “Put in a better example,” “write in the first person,” “don’t use LinkedIn language,” “shorten that list.”

• And, you can go through this again and again adding layer and layer.

All throughout this, you’re using Google Docs as both a buffer and the working draft. One thing about this is that Google Docs silently keeps versions of your doc - most people don’t seem to know this.2

This lets you edit in a proper editor, of course. Also, because Google Docs keeps numerous different versions of your document, you won’t lose the various stages. Sometimes the layering-cycle of going through AI edits, doing your own edits, and so forth really washes our your original text and you want to go back, or, at least compare the new text with older versions.

How to be my editor

After the initial drafting, most of what ChatGPT is doing for you is what an editor and copyeditor would do. I don’t like to admit this, but writing gets better with editing and copyediting.3 When I write, I hate waiting for this part: I always want to click publish right away. Worse, if the editor doesn’t know my style, they tend to edit out “me.” The first few times I work with an editor, we usually have to go back and forth a bit before they “get” my style.

Well, you know where this is going: generative AI is a great editor. It’s fast, it responds to what you ask, and it’s good.

After a round of thinking about, outlining, drafting, rewriting, editing, drafting, polishing, rewriting…you get the idea…with Claude and ChatGPT, I put the final version into Claude and asked it for advice to give future editors and copywriters. I used this prompt:

OK, this is what I've ended up with that I like [I pasted in the final text]. I want you to look at it, compare to the work we've been doing here, the original, etc. and write some commentary and advice for a future editor and copy editor (like yourself) for working with me. What kind of text do I like, what do I need help with (to get to what I like and make up for my flaws in writing), etc.

Here’s what it wrote back. It seems accurate for my style and how to edit it:

Editorial Guide for Working with Michael Coté

Writing Style & Preferences

Michael prefers:

• Direct, experience-based narratives

• Clear technical substance without marketing fluff

• Conversational but professional tone

• Real examples from his work with enterprises

• Structured content that builds logical arguments

• Precise technical terminology without buzzwords

• Occasional humor and cultural references (often self-deprecating)

Key Patterns in His Writing

1 Opening Structure

• Starts with a real problem he’s observed

• Uses first-person narrative to establish credibility

• Quickly moves to practical solutions

2 Technical Depth

• Balances technical detail with accessibility

• Prefers concrete examples over abstract concepts

• Likes to cite real organizations and cases

3 Organization

• Uses clear section headings

• Builds arguments systematically

• Alternates between principles and examples

Areas Where He Needs Editorial Support

1 Structure Refinement

• Help tighten opening paragraphs

• Ensure consistent section transitions

• Maintain focus on key arguments

2 Language Polishing

• Remove redundancies while preserving conversational tone

• Tighten technical explanations

• Maintain consistent voice across sections

3 Examples & Citations

• Help integrate citations naturally

• Ensure examples support main points

• Balance between personal experience and external sources

Editorial Approach

When editing his work:

1 Preserve his direct, experienced-based voice

2 Maintain technical precision

3 Tighten structure while keeping conversational flow

4 Keep his cultural references and humor

5 Help integrate sources naturally

Common Fixes Needed

1 Opening paragraphs often need tightening

2 Transitions between sections can be smoother

3 Technical explanations sometimes need more focus

4 Citations could be more naturally integrated

What to Avoid

• Don’t add marketing language or buzzwords

• Don’t remove personal experience elements

• Don’t over-formalize the tone

• Don’t eliminate cultural references or humor

This guide should help editors maintain Michael’s authentic voice while improving clarity and impact.

I haven’t used that yet, but it looks like it’d be helpful.

Wastebook

• If you don’t know what time it is, assume you’re late, and start moving faster.

• “Has anyone ever had an orgasm eating mayonnaise?” Noah.

• “When selling a hotdog and soda for $1.50 can’t unite Americans, perhaps nothing can.” The Economist on CostCo.

• “The work isn't producing the output, that's a tiny fraction of it. The work is thinking, taking time to understand the problem you're trying to solve, making sure it's the right one, communicating and collaborating around it within an organisational and economic system, it's.. complex. What we call "knowledge work" is about as far from being on a production line as you can get and yet here we still are dealing with this nonsense.” Sue Smith.

Relative to your interests

• Gartner Survey Shows Supply Chain GenAI Productivity Gains at Individual Level, While Creating New Complications for Organizations - The robot summarizes what’s happening here with theory of constraints, clever! // Robot: “Alice now processes orders faster, but Bob and Charlie still work at their original pace. If Alice completes 20% more orders, but Bob can only arrange transport for the same number as before, then Alice’s extra work sits idle–no overall productivity gain for the team.”

• Ten Trends That Shaped the Cloud Market in 2024 - ”Around 60% of cloud buyers told IDC’s 3Q24 Cloud Pulse Survey October 2024 that their business’ IT or digital infrastructure currently requires major transformation, and 82% said their cloud also required modernization.” // Good summary of a very expensive analyst report.

• The Peter Principle - by Nicholas Decker - “Promotions are used as incentives, even if they don’t always match future competence.”

• Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Using culture-blitz to incrementally change society.

• Apple Invites - This sounds ridiculous.

• Deep Research - “I do not currently see signs of originality, but the level of accuracy and clarity is stunning, and it can write and analyze at any level you request. The work also shows the model can engage in a kind of long-term planning, and that will generalize to some very different contexts and problems as well – that is some of the biggest news associated with this release.”

Logoff

Did you want to see the Coté Tech Professional 2 style Claude came up with? Here it is:

Write technical articles about enterprise software development using the Minto Pyramid Principle: start with clear conclusions and key takeaways, then provide structured reasoning and evidence. Use a direct, first-person narrative style with occasional humor and cultural references. Prioritize substantive technical insights over marketing language. Include precise citations, links to sources, and empirical evidence supporting claims. Structure content with clear section headings. In conclusions, introduce one novel conceptual insight that doesn't require extensive defense. Maintain a professional yet conversational tone that balances technical depth with strategic clarity. Avoid hyperbole, buzzwords, and unsubstantiated claims.

<userExamples>

# Revolutionizing Enterprise Software Delivery: The Power of Developer Platforms

In today's rapidly evolving technology landscape, organizations are discovering transformative approaches to software development that go beyond traditional methodologies. Developer platforms represent a strategic evolution in how companies enable technological innovation.

Key Strategic Insights:

- Shift from controlling to enabling development teams

- Create standardized yet flexible technological ecosystems

- Accelerate innovation through intelligent platform design

The modern enterprise doesn't just implement technology—it cultivates a dynamic environment where developers can rapidly translate business needs into robust solutions. By providing comprehensive toolsets and clear architectural guidance, organizations can dramatically reduce friction in the software development lifecycle.

Technical Foundations:

1. Centralized discovery mechanisms

2. Self-service deployment capabilities

3. Comprehensive observability frameworks

Case studies consistently demonstrate that well-designed developer platforms can reduce onboarding time, improve security compliance, and increase overall team productivity by removing unnecessary technological barriers.

</userExamples>

As with all things AI: (1) it used pseudo-XML, and, (2) the more I refine this, the better it will get…probably.

As you might have seen in the demo, I’ve made several styles.

One I’m interested in messing around with more is the D&D Adventure one. You see, with that, I’m not trying to get a writing style for it, I’m trying to get an interaction style, a conversation style. That might even be a way to slip in some more systems-ish prompting.

Maybe you could this style for conversation style, not writing style. So, when you’re playing D&D with the robot, you could use a style guide to say “be thing kind of DM.” Get transcript or your favorite DM - Chris Perkins has hours and hours online4 - and get Claude to make a style. Would it drive mechanics, or just what’s written is responses? Is there a difference?

Today it’s all wastebook.

Wastebook

• “gizmocrat” and ”gizmocrats,” new govt IT outsourcing term?

• “Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was tweeting about guacamole prices over the weekend as Musk took over key functions of the government.” Two weeks in.

• “Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk,” attributed to William Gibson.

• “Tariffying,” The Economist.

• “There’s probably a couple of kinks in that slinky,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.).

• “power the West to its obvious innate superiority.” #PalantirLife.

• “It’s cheap, so it’s not a vice.” Jason.

• “Hee-haw cars.” Roderick.

• “I want to believe that the JP Morgan analyst tried to get compliance to let them call the note ‘Fuck this bullshit.’” Slides Benedict.

• “BYOAI.”

• ”You cannot be a software startup and just be a sustainable business; the ecosystem will reject you.” Here.

• “Once your code is out there, it can’t be controlled by a MEGACORP,” overheard at cfgmgmtcamp 2025.

Logoff

I don’t know if I’m uninspired, if everything is lost in the DeepSeek funk, or what, but I haven’t found much worth linking to yet. We’ll see what the second half of the week brining.

Hello. How are you today?

Wastebook

• "MAGA makeover' and “Texas Blowout.” US hair news from the UK.

• “your dissimilar appearance to other social media influencers.” Aaron on my influencer aesthetics.

• “Some people want something else, and that’s fine for them.” John Dickerson, Political Gabfest, Jan 30th, 2025.

• ”romantasy, which blends spicy sex scenes and romance tropes with supernatural elements, is not a fleeting trend." At which Rebecca Yarros excels.

• "groyperfication, "John Ganz.

• And: grassroots → netroots “Poached eggs and small, uncomfortable stools,” found by Russell.

• ”I fear that we’re just killing any form of empathy and enshrining that in the regular process of government.” What does he know?

Relative to your interests

• D&D: Some Kind Of Monster (Type) - This is a great pondering of monster types and their, like, existential essence. Lots to think on! // “The convoluted agreements common to many Fey are an aspect of their adherence to a particular vector of existence. If they agree to something, everyone has to agree that their perspective is the perspective through which the fey are experiencing reality.” // Ponderous! This seems derived from the idea that Fey take oaths very seriously. In the other side, this similar to fiends (devils) being bound by contracts.

• ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. DeepSeek: The Battle to Be My AI Work Assistant - Good overview of what Claude is good for and what ChatGPT is good for. // Some “yes, but” accompaniment here.

• Dell ends hybrid work policy despite remote work pledge - “'Overall, our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values,” the authors state in their paper. ‘Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.’" // RTO is a dress code.

• Purely AI-generated art can’t get copyright protection, says Copyright Office - If you can’t control it, you can’t copyright it. Aside from terms of service (which, I think, don’t like this:) this means you can freely use all AI generated images…I guess? I think there’ll be some court-cases defining how much control someone needs to have or have not.

• Clouded Judgement 1.30.25 - The Year of AI Applications - Finance-nerd explanation of the “this is actually great!” case for last week: “What’s happened over the last 12 months is the cost per API call (ie the cost for inference) for these models has plummeted. Open source models like Llama, R1 from DeepSeek, etc have all contributed to this. It’s become even more clear the model calls themselves are commoditizing quickly. And this is great! If the variable ‘COGS’ component of marginal API call approaches zero, many of the questions listed above start to go away. You don’t worry about your margins shrinking, changing the pricing doesn’t become a must, etc. This in turn leads to a LOT more experimenting with AI features / functionalities. The radius of complexity shrinks.”

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

I’m at cfgmgmtcamp today, speaking tomorrow. Here’s a preview of the slides if you’re curious. There’s a livestream for today, tomorrow’s will probably be here. It’s nice to have a “the conference I go to every year” conference. It usually falls on my wife’s birthday, which is annoying. But, it does mean I get to give her one of her favorite foods for her birthday: genuine Belgian waffles.

//

I’ve been experimenting with the ChatDM more; that is, using chat AIs to solo play Dungeons & Dragons. It’s getting a lot better than two years ago. Claude is probably superior, but ChatGPT seems to operate better - it can certainly handle more project files. I think of what I’m doing as “meatsack agentic AI.” I have to do all the workflow and memory management that a real agentic AI framework would do for you.

The results are…OK. It still lacks imagination and (no pun intended) initiative. The AIs refuse over and over to move to the next step. For example, in “Mazfroth's Mighty Digressions,” you encounter a book that transforms into a hungry blob that wants to eat you. Per the adventure, after you read the book it’s disguised as, it is supposed to attack you immediately. The AI just can’t do it…it stays in a constant state of “and then…and then…and then…”

Now, of course this all about prompting and coaxing. You can get it to do exactly what you want if you tell it to do it. But, that is not the point, the point is that the chat AIs should be good at DM’ing and know what normally happens, and do it.

My agentic hopes are that I could put together some guidance for actions to take in encounters. Whenever an encounter happens, whatever the agentic framework is would go use this little “tool” and it could push the main chat AI to, like, do something.

We’ll see!

Socrates Didn’t Whiteboard

This week’s Software Defined Talk: “This week, we discuss the latest news about DeepSeek, how to make sense of the countless hot takes, and a review of The Nvidia Way. Plus, some thoughts on Valentine’s Day.” Take a listen, or watch the unedited recording, and subscribe if you don’t already.

(I wanted to make sure about that whiteboarding, so I asked to robot. Checks out.)

Relative to your interests

• Cloud vs. On-Prem: Which Is Better for Your Kubernetes Cluster? - The New Stack - You could also buy a stack instead of building one. Another consideration: use a PaaS.

• DOGE, Software, and Government - “DOGE has become the great Wishing Well of political punditry.” // The difficulties of IT modernization in large organizations, well explained in a mini-case study. It’s always people and culture, etc.

Yes, but..

Wastebook

• “toxic positivity." Here.

• “Everyone on all sides is arguing their interests, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech, January 30thc 2025.

• That meeting could have been an email. A very short email.

• “Although Mr Ellison has handed over the CEO reins to an able lieutenant, Safra Catz, the closest he has to a true succession plan is funding anti-ageing research.” Schumpeter

• And: “Mr Ellison’s brash corporate persona conceals an intensely private man whose non-business views are almost as invisible as his company’s ubiquitous software.”

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

Logoff

I’ve discovered Alfred. I have resisted these launch bar things forever, just using Spotlight. But, I think I get it now! Especially if I was a programmer and was always fucking around with files, I could see this would be amazing. Even typing “win” to select a window to switch to is pretty good. // Also, my friend DaShaun graciously offered to help me re-learn Java and Spring (live streamed, no less!) with the goal of writing some MCP servers for Claude to - you guessed it! - play D&D with The AI. We didn’t get to the MCP part, but I think we’re close!

Take a walk with me and ponder cheaper AI:

I found some good charts for this one:

1. "State of Enterprise Tech Spending," Battery Ventures, September, 2024.

2. “Where's the Value in AI?" BCG, October, 2024.

3. 🍃 Spring AI, an open source SDK for using AI.

4. Tanzu AI Solutions and VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA.

This chart in particular is helpful. It’s showing that there aren’t actually that many - hardly any! - AI apps in production:

Hopefully that number will go way up on the next 12 to 24 months. Don’t over exuberant, though: as with the migration to public cloud, “the future can take a long time.”

Wastebook

• “God in a spray can,” PKD.

• ”wordcel,” here.

• “January 25th.- I have fallen in love, or imagine myself to have fallen in love. It happened at an evening party. I quite lost my head. I have bought a horse which I do not need.” Tolstoy, via Russell.

• “Tonight was waffle night, where I make waffles for the next 6 weekends.” Aaron.

• “It’s the longest ‘next week’ of my life.”

• “Enterprise data landfill,” inspired by Lars.

Relative to your interests

• All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot - “The erosion of my brain is a function of time and small children. I do not believe there’s a force in technology that is more deleterious than the beauty of life.” // Amen, brother. // And: ‘As for screen exposure, he says, what do we even mean by that? “It could be anything. The screen is just a medium but what matters is content. So when you talk about screen, you might as well talk about paper. Paper is another medium, and anything can be written on paper.”’

• The Product Model and Agile - Yeah, getting to “agile product management” is tough. The Pivotal Labs people seemed to have figured it out, but marrying up weekly app releases with applying the scientific method to your app’s features (product management) is elusive.

• Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red - Dimensional/Azul survey “found the percentage of Oracle Java users considering switching to alternative JVMs or JDKs based an open approach increased from 72 percent in 2023 to 88 percent in 2024. The proportion wanting to leave Oracle reached 92 percent in France and 95 percent Germany…. in 2023, research from Gartner showed that costs could be between two and five times greater under the new licensing model, for using the same software.”

• Spring Cloud Services for Tanzu Platform - Spring Cloud Services for Cloud Foundry v3.3 introduces an enhanced dashboard UI, improved configuration validation, and simplified secret management.

• Trump cribs Musk’s “fork in the road” Twitter memo to slash gov’t workforce - Big layoff vibes for 2025.

• The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - ”Only about 9% of respondents were indeed mature by the CNCF Platform Maturity Model’s standards.” // (1) There must be a lot of Tanzu Platform users in that 9%, (2) good thing we decided to throw out all the previous PaaS work and build up from the Kubernetes studs…

• Kubernetes Cloud Repatriation Saves Millions for Data Platform Provider - "It has reported an annual saving of $3.9 million by moving its development and testing environments away from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. According to Neil Carson of Yellowbrick, the company had been spending about $6 million per year across the three major cloud providers when the repatriation project began in 2022.” // Yes, and see a closer read by Corey Quinn.

• GKE and its developer appeal to scale workloads - Giving people what they need to operate at “Google Scale”…whether they need to or not.

• “What advice would you give to people about how to prepare for advanced AI?” - Lots of advice about integrating the outcomes of AI into your life. No prompts or anything, but more how everyday life could change if we have AI doing more stuff.

• DeepSeek Just “Opened” The Path To AI ROI - “Short term, that is bad news for NVIDIA because it will temper the demand. Longer term, however, the lower cost (and, thus, energy) will open up model creation opportunities for many, many more startups and enterprises alike, thereby increasing demand.”

• On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence Features - Yeah, I like the results and utilities of the Writing Tools, but the the UI is clunky as fuck. Plus, they don’t have Shortcuts support. That would be really useful. // “Writing Tools on MacOS is the most obviously flawed of the Apple Intelligence features suffering from weak implementation or questionable U.I. choices, but there are other examples, too.”

• Nosferatu (2024), review from Warren Ellis - Great review of a great movie.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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Fun with charts:

Relative to your interests

• How Cloud Ingestion Pricing Eats Your Budget - ”Essentially, yes, the cloud can be cheaper — but only if you’re using it the right way.”

• Microsoft and Google Are Forcing Customers to Adopt AI at a Premium Price: What Customers Need to Know - “84 million customers x $36 (the annual increase per subscription) = $3,024,000,000”

• Core Principles of AI Data Readiness - Maybe enterprise AI is all about getting your data into shape. Historically, that is very difficult. Good luck!

• DeepSeek and the Enterprise - ”Enterprises that want to embrace AI, in other words, have reasons to want to do so on their own infrastructure. But that has posed its own set of challenges, challenges which have led many enterprises to scale back their ambitions and turn their eyes from large, expensive foundational models to small, more cost efficient and easily trained alternatives.”

• 1,156 Questions Censored by DeepSeek - ”It will matter less once models similar to R1 are reproduced without these restrictions (which will probably be in a week or so)."

• Year in review: Google’s biggest AI advancements of 2024

• OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies - That should get a lot of enterprise CISO’s to move on allowing AI in their orgs. // ”Since the beginning of 2024, OpenAI said that more than 90,000 employees of federal, state and local governments have generated more than 18 million prompts within ChatGPT, using the tech to translate and summarize documents, write and draft policy memos, generate code, and build applications. The user interface for ChatGPT Gov looks like ChatGPT Enterprise. The main difference is that government agencies will use ChatGPT Gov in their own Microsoft Azure commercial cloud, or Azure Government community cloud, so they can “manage their own security, privacy and compliance requirements,” Felipe Millon, who leads federal sales and go-to-market for OpenAI, said on the call with reporters.” // Also, coverage from The Register.

• What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far - Lessons learned.

• IDG to divest Foundry, what’s next for IDC? - Forester and IDC merging would be awesome. They’re have great qualitative and quantitative coverage. See some comps here. And if they breathed new life into the Wave, maybe by adding in IDC’s market estimates, that’d be interesting. There’s, of course, the PE roll-up firms like Futurum, but those seem too small. Maybe some i-bankers find someone with cash and roll-up the roll-ups with an IDC anchor. Anyhow, I like both of their stuff so I hope they keep it going.

• Struggling with your marketing strategy? You’re not alone. Here’s some things to think about in 2025 - I think that, like all struggling corporate functions, the answer is to make sure you’re actually doing the basics. // Also, less planning, more clicking the publish button: quality through quantity. // And, some AI use suggestions.

Wastebook

• The only people who don’t like The Register are the people it covers.

• “the FIG triumvirate,” used for Forrester, IDC, and Gartner.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. VMUG NL, Den Bosch, March 12th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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I’ve got the first conference of the year next week, my annual attendance of cfgmgmtcamp, and often speaking at it too like this year. I’ve got a new talk on private cloud. This is a bit of a risk: I don’t know if that cloud will be interested or throw tomatoes. Who knows: they’re a pretty good crowd.

Interview: Brian Gracely

Whitney and I interviewed Brian Gracely for this week’s Software Defined Interviews episode. It was a great, big ol’ basket of topics: the process of gathering and reporting cloud news, the evolution of PaaS, and the pros and cons of working at small startups versus large companies. Also: career advice, the importance of communicating value within organizations, and how to stay relevant in the ever-changing tech landscape. And still more: Brian shares insights on how to generate engaging content for podcasts and the impact of internal communication on company culture.

If you don’t already subscribe to the podcast, you should do that! You can just go to the show page and listen to it there too, and there’s the video recording of the episode too.

What went wrong with PaaS?

In the interview, I asked Brian how PaaS went wrong in the 2010’s, and he gave a well thought out answer. I can’t say I disagree with him, especially in hindsight.

You should, of course, listen to his whole answer, but here’s what I’ve been thinking about since talking with him:

1. The PaaS vendors at the time started off focused on one language and, arguably, one buyer. Heroku was focused on startups and smaller development teams, specializing in Ruby. Cloud Foundry sort of started focusing on Java, but when it finally was released, it was very ruby focused. You can see a tension, almost, between those two languages in the first announcement.

2. When PaaSes tried to be “all things to all people,” it spread things too thin. It was hard to support all the little wing-dings and shiny objects each language community wanted.

3. This led to “opinionated platforms,” restricting what developers can do as a feature. For the record, I think this is incredibly valuable. Chasing “the shiny and new” is a silent killer for enterprise app strategy.

4. People wanted to customize, and was a window Kubernetes took advantage of. It promised that you could build you own PaaS and get it exactly how you wanted it.

5. Thus, the PaaS idea waned.

As you know, dear readers, I think this has been a setback, going on almost ten years now. Hopefully we’re finally emerging from the platform dark ages after the container orchestration calamity and can get back to focusing on platforms. Just remember to not destroy our progress it all in five or so years.

Wastebook

• He’s like if Martin Fowler and Hunter Thompson had a baby.

• “magical coherence,” on Apple.

• “I’m 64 years old. I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I made horror films and sold yogurt that makes you shit. I never thought I would hear my name at the Oscars.” Jamie Lee Curtis.

• “Discoursepolitik,” and:

• ”Invasion Of The Bluesky Disagree Bots.”

• There’s a passage in You Shouldn’t Have Come Here about eating beans and weenies that I’m pretty sure is metaphor for trepidation about having sex. (Also, it has bacon in it, which is a good twist on some classic, American trash-food.)

• ”One Hand To Shake Beats One Throat To Choke” Naveen Chhabra, Forrester. “common culture is a delusion of my age,” Warren Ellis.

• Are any of these big-ass spending announcements ever true? Also, even though their product is amazing, these OpenAI guys are seeming more and more sketchy.

Relative to your interests

• A free, powerful Chinese AI model just dropped — but don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square - Great, now the AIs are getting political. // I guess you could also so: at least, politics I don’t like.

• Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race - ”Open source, publishing papers, in fact, do not cost us anything. For technical talent, having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect. There is also a cultural attraction for a company to do this.”

• Ignore the Grifters - AI Isn’t Going to Kill the Software Industry - “we’ll eventually allocate our scarce AI resources towards the things they are best at, which leaves plenty of things for humans to do.” // Among other things, there’s a simple point about technology advancements that threaten human employment: there is so much work to do that we can find more for everyone, machine and meat sack.

• 4 Lessons We Learned from Bringing AI to Our Company - “Next, you’ll face potential roadblocks, as privacy and security teams will be looking into where the models you use are hosted and where the data is stored. Chat.com, Gemini.com, or anything free of charge and a privacy nightmare is out of the question.”

• Why run AI on-premise? - Big ol' list of why you’d chose private cloud. // “While cloud-based AI services offer scalability and cost-effectiveness, especially for testing and early use cases, enterprises are increasingly considering on-premise AI solutions. Factors such as data sovereignty, security, performance, and cost are driving this shift, particularly as AI projects grow and require more data and processing power. Enterprises are also exploring less resource-intensive models and open-source options to reduce costs and improve efficiency.”

• OpenAI releases Operator agent as rivals enhance their AI services - ”When users ask Operator to perform a task in a website, the agent navigates to the relevant URL using a built-in browser. It can type, click and scroll to carry out the requested action. Operator regularly takes screenshots of the website to check that everything is working as expected. ” // Hopefully they’ll do some MCP here to be industry plugin friendly, but it’s doubtful.

• Are better models better? - “Part of the concept of ‘Disruption’ is that important new technologies tend to be bad at the things that matter to the previous generation of technology, but they do something else important instead.”

• How to use NotebookLM Plus for your business - The fact that most AIs can’t generate PowerPoint might be great: people will stop using decks for operations and go to the more helpful document. Slides for daily operations is terrible way to run the railroad. You could start doing PRFAQs and 6 pagers.

• Intuit CTO keeps 8,000 engineers on track with a base platform of common services - Centralizing, standardizing.

• The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - “The majority of the organizations surveyed – 56% – have had platform teams for less than two years. A mere 13% of respondents reported working in ‘platform engineering’ for more than five years.”

• Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors - “The main trend across the industry: consolidation. Companies try to control their bills.”

• Return to PaaS: Building the Platform of Our Dreams - It’s a tough slog.

• RTO Watch: “75% of workers with jobs that could be done remotely said their employer has put in-person mandates in place, according to a Pew Research survey conducted last fall and released last week. That’s up from 63% in 2023.” // RTO vs. WFH is a management vs. workers issue. I’m convinced that RTO has no rational basis, it’s just a culture that’s chosen or not. This could be great, this could be bad, but it’s a choice of how you structure the system and the negatives you accept (you limit your labor supply).

• Empowering Your IT Future: The Shift to Private Cloud - (1) Cost control vs public cloud (2) Data sovereignty (especially in APAC and EU) (3) Private AI capabilities (4) Enhanced license portability across environments.

• M&A and the Product Model - Silicon Valley Product Group : Silicon Valley Product Group - At tech companies, achieving synergies is very difficult, and predicting if you can do the work is even harder. // “Most people experienced in due diligence have a reasonable understanding of assessing the product – the customers, the financials, the offering, the technology used to build that product, and especially the go-to-market for that product. Yet these same people often do not have the experience to understand what it will take to integrate the newly acquired product with the parent company’s existing systems and operations, or migrate the customers to the existing company’s systems, or in many cases, especially in cases of significant technical debt, to re-platform the product, or to change the product to work effectively with the parent company’s go-to-market channels.” // Keeping the acquired company as a mostly separate entity - product wise - is a good strategy, e.g., YouTube, maybe Red Hat? It means you won’t kill off the thing you acquired the company for by meddling with it, integrating it into the way your company works.

• The Product Model Solves For Tech Debt - ”Forrester does not recommend ROI as a criteria for deciding to rectify technical debt, which should be seen more as essential maintenance spend.” // If you ran rail company they shouldn’t spend money on train maintenance, they’d tell you would kill the business (and people). Software is the same, executives just need to get that through the head. The ROI of reducing and limiting of limiting tech debt is the ability to function after 12 to 24 months.

• Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide - I’ve been wondering if it’s worth reading the new DM guide. It looks like it.

• Spotify’s playlists have altered the music industry in unexpected ways - artists are often disrupted first. Study how their business models - and personal compensation changes - and you can prepare and defend yourself.

• The return of skinny jeans? Men’s catwalks suggest wide-legged trousers are out and calf-huggers back in - Looks like a dodged a bullet on this one by wearing my old Gen-X pants despite the trends.

• Alternatives to “sorry” - American English meanings for “sorry.” // Yes, and:: in the Netherlands (and other parts of Europe), “sorry” is usually used like the en_US “excuse me” or “pardon me.” If you’re walking into a busy tram and you need to press through people you say “sorry, sorry.” And, it’s the English word everywhere not the local equivalent.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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Also, there’s last week’s Software Defined Talk (lots of beans in chili talk, plus the usual nerd-shit), and here’s a thread of mine of reasons to be optimistic about DeepSeek lowering the cost of AI, or skeptical of freaking out. // If you’re into D&D, I started a tumblr that’s a commonplace book for my D&D thinking. That means it’s inspiration, scraps, concepts, and other things that get me thinking about and developing D&D ideas. I’m putting a lot of my AI generated stuff in there too, and maps I make. Obviously, it has plenty of content from others as I scroll and find it. Check it out!

Catch-up: what we learn from Sonos and OpenTofu, how I use AI at work, Bluesky is getting pretty good.

Agentic AI

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Tanzu point of view on AI and the stack we have (Spring AI and the VMware Tanzu AI Solutions). There’s a lot mysticism around agentic AI, but when you reduce it down to an API, you can simplify it. Spend less time thinking about fully autonomous AI that, like, writes its own code, and more just focusing on putting AI into enterprise apps.

What makes it enterprise AI is that you architect and manage it to be used by hundreds and thousands of apps and people in regulated organizations. These are not tech companies, and I mean that in a good way. They’re the organizations that keep lives tidy and keep the lights on. I like a clean, well lit place. This means you want to build platforms, pay attention to cost, accuracy, and as many -illity’s as you can afford.

There are some core patterns you need for any enterprise app, and just making sure you can handle them in your AI-enabled apps will be enough work for the next five years, if not more. There’s, like, eight or ten basic functions to agentic AI. And then you need to get access to models (local or in public cloud): you need an AI broker. Pick a framework and a broker start using it.

In my world, large organizations, Java dominates and, thus, Spring is extremely popular, so I’d recommend that. It’ll change and adapt very quickly to whatever comes along, and then you can protect yourself from shifts in the future: Spring will be a safe boat in the weird waves of enterprise AI.

But, what is agentic AI?

Here’s three, recent definition:

1. "At its core, the concept of an agent is fairly simple. An agent is defined by the environment it operates in and the set of tools it has access to. In an AI-powered agent, the AI model is the brain that leverages its tools and feedback from the environment to plan how best to accomplish a task. Access to tools makes a model vastly more capable, so the agentic pattern is inevitable." –Chip Huyen, author of AI Engineering, January 7th, 2025.

2. "'[A]gents' has become a loosely defined term in the post-ChatGPT era, often referring to LLMs that are tasked with outputting actions (tool calls) and that run in an autonomous setting…. [T]hey require state management (retaining the message/event history, storing long-term memories, executing multiple LLM calls in an agentic loop) and tool execution (safely executing an action output by an LLM and returning the result)." –Letta blog, "The AI agents stack," November 14th, 2025.

3. "[A]gentic AI, which uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems…. Agentic AI systems ingest vast amounts of data from multiple data sources and third-party applications to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies and execute tasks." Erik Pounds, NVIDIA blog, October 22, 2024.

This means looking trendy agentic AI. What an award thing to have to type each time: do you craft your sentences so you write “AI agent,” or just dive into the absurdity of “agentic AI”? Also, as you look at what agentic AI is evolving to, it’s quick becoming “all of AI.” Just doing one-shot generative AI prompting is not that interesting or useful, really. At the very least, you need to store context and memory, and then have access to tools and functions…and then you’re off into agentic AI.

While the definition of an AI agent will continue to evolve, here’s some key aspects:

1. The agent is/can be autonomous.

2. The agent uses data, context/environment, memory.

3. The agent plans and takes actions.

Agentic AI theory is trying to get more from generative AI, to get it to "do things."

Always focus on the work actually being done. Ask “what is the app and what will it do?”

Wastebook

• “Face computer” v. “skinny computer.” Om on Apple.

• Mutesignaling.

• “Exhausted Majority.” Charts.

• “Does content exposure to this get me closer to the person I want to be?” RotL #567.

• “John Fetterman’s Shorts.” Casual drsesscode.

• “A preference cascade” Here.

• “There’s a melee of dwarves on the floor to each side of you.” Dust up in Citadel Akbar.

• They don’t mean it, or even know they’re doing it, they’re just a casual asshole.

• For ever brain that is drained, there are three brains waiting. Any brain that wants to drain should feel free to: keep moving and get out of the way.

Relative to your interests

• Building Effective Agents with Spring AI - rapid development going on in the Java/Spring community with AI.

• Best Prompt for Academic Papers Summary/Analysis - “Explain this paper to me using the Feynman technique, considering yourself as the author”

• Share of teens using ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled from 2023 to 2024 - It’s great for all your education needs. // Worth considering in any discussion of generative AI for education is: compared to what? In my experience, there are not enough nor enough access to meat-teachers. The AI is always there. This mans there is more access, when students need it. That is not bad.

• Common pitfalls when building generative AI applications - Good list, and not just the general purpose pitfalls.

• Protecting your mental health during a clown president’s second term

• Trump signs order setting up DOGE with a focus on government tech - ‘Now, USDS is set to work on a “Software Modernization Initiative,” per the executive order, “to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization,” the executive order read.’

• 2025–01–21 - “I do not have a solution for any of this stuff, and I despair as much as the next sane human being, but one thing has become clearer and clearer since 2016; social media, like Monty Python’s Camelot, is a silly place.”

• “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it!” - Any weapon you make can be turned against you.

• Gartner sees 10% IT spending jump in 2025, but don’t get too excited

• How pointy shoes created a moral panic in medieval London - It’s good to remember that hundreds of years later, and prohibition against fashion makes the probities look like idiots with too much time on their hands. // Also, Dutch businessmen don’t seem to have stopped wearing them.

• New D&D Book Releases in 2025: Monster Manual, Anthologies, and More

• - Researchers are questioning if ADHD should be seen as a disorder - It’s better to think of most psychological friction (“problems,” you don’t bristle at the term) in reverse: what is the system doing wrong that’s causing people to act poorly. // This is especially true in the workplace where profit doesn’t give a fuck about curing and would rather do whatever it takes (within the law) for the desired business outcome.

• Abscission - Taking care of your mental state when you quit a job.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Ghent, Feb 3rd to 5th, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. Monki Gras, London, March 27th to 28th, speaking. CF Day US, Palo Alto, CA, May 14th. NDC Oslo, May 21st to 23rd, speaking. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

Discounts: 10% off SREDay London with the code LDN10.

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Fintan started a daily links log. I love daily links logs! I get a lot of links and enjoy two: Richard Seroter’s and Assaf Arkin’s, as noted in my colophon. It’ll be cool to see what Fintan catalogs, if you like my weird pile of links, you’ll like the previous two and Fintan’s, like and subscribe!

//

Several of my talks were accepted, so you’ll see some more conferences above.

//

I saw someone doing that “ICYMI” thing at the top, so I thought I’d put a “Catch-up” line in there. Beats me, I just want them clicks.

Now that we’ve replaced all these people with a robot, how can we climb the CAGR?

I was a guest on the Cloudcast this week. I go over how I use AI and then Brian and I discuss how companies could get more use out of AI.

Most of it, I think, rests on how management behaves and uses AI. As with all “productivity” tools, management can get some quick-wins on “productivity” by replacing people with automation - firing humans, favoring computers. But that’s empty calories. That’s a one-time bottom line numbers juice.

After AI “optimizes” your company by removing costs, how is management then going to grow revenue and company valuation? To do that, you need to take the free time people have after automating all the bullshit tasks out, and do something new with that free-time.

Is management ready to deal with the question “now that our meatware has have 10% more free time across the board, what will we do?” Executives always complain that they need more budget, that they can’t find the “talent” they need (read: we choose not to pay people what they’re worth), that they just can’t get things done because everyone is so busy (and incompetent), etc. Well, applied correctly, using AI in the enterprise addresses some of that. Now’s management’s chance!

Part of the “ethics” thing here is more of a mindset change. In the West, we have a belief that if you haven’t suffered, real work hasn’t been done. You can’t just be killed to save humanity, you have to drag your own machine of death to the hill. We value sacrifice and suffering. If something is effortless, it must be less valuable and, likely, not even real work.

So, in a corporate setting, if all the sudden you can spit out text and ideas that previously took a week…we don’t know how to deal with the ethics or that. Did I do actual work? Should I be paying this person for just asking a computer for a “FY25Q3 marketing strategy” and then getting a draft that what would have taken two weeks of meetings? Is it unethical for me to “take credit” for the work? Is it like taking credit for the work Excel does for you (“they’re a wizard at Excel!”), or taking credit for the work that one of your staff does for you (“they steal ideas from their people”)?

This goes both ways though: what’s the ethics of an executive using an AI to write routine internal emails. Internal communication in a company is very expensive, important, and risky. Creating it takes many skilled hands, many meetings, and usually leads to boring, barely functional text. And if the workers reading it misunderstand it and go off in the wrong direction, that negative effect compounds. Worse, it could demoralize them! And, if employees thought the executive uses AI to write one of these emails, some (many?) workers would think it was disingenuous and slimy.

Another thought-tool: executives hire management consultant firms to do studies and come up with strategy. How is this different than them using ChatGPT to do the same? The answer to this is helpful as well: strategy is just step one of hundreds. Once you have the strategy doc, you now have to figure out how to apply it, how to adapt to reality, and all the other stuff we call “execution.” You could ask the management consultants (or ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to help there, but then you’ll still need to actually do the work. AI doesn’t do the actual work, meatware does.

Despite all the AI glory-talk, I’d wildly estimate that less than 10% of knowledge workers are using AI seriously for their daily work. We have no idea what how enterprises will apply and benefit from generative AI usage once 30%, 50%, 80% of them use it “all day long.” I don’t think anyone is prepared for what to do after all that productivity is disgorged onto the meeting room table. In your enterprise AI strategy, is there a slide that says what you’re going to do with all that free time your meat-sacks will have?

As with instant messaging in the 2000s, there’s plenty of shadow IT going on. At the moment, those workers are getting a boost over everyone else. In a delightful twist on productivity-by-firing, AI is likely benefiting individual workers more than corporations right now.

Anyhow. Brian and I talk about all that in the discussion. More importantly, I also give a slight overview on using AI to play D&D.

Listen to it!

Relative to your interests

• The Ultimate Guide to Grappling in D&D - This is one of the more obscure combat actions in D&D, but actually seems really useful, especially. for lower level characters.

• Sonos’ interim CEO hits all the right notes in first letter to employees - This “hey, I’m the new executive” memo is some well done internal comms. He literally has a Sanos tattoo and mentions three times that he’s uses the products.

• Understanding Private Cloud, Hybrid Infrastructure, Multi-Cloud, and Distributed Cloud: A Comprehensive Framework - Classify cloud based on how much control you have and much mixing of other clouds you have. As opposed to where the cloud is. Also, a little bit about NetApp ONTP.

• Google Workspace business getting full Gemini, price increase - Instead of charging $20 to 30 extra a month of AI, give it to everyone and raise everyone’s price by $2. // Teams pricing going up similarly.

• What CIOs should know as DORA regulations kick in - All the great -ility’s. // “The business continuity standards laid out in the EU’s DORA require banks, insurers, securities exchanges, trading venues and other financial services providers to maintain backup systems for swift incident recovery. The EU expects impacted parties to be able to restore critical functions within two hours of an outage incident, per DORA.”

• Brainwash An Executive Today! - (1) What it’s like to market to technical people. (2) He doesn’t like LinkedIn. (3) he discovers enterprise event marketing.

• Trying Times for Tech - “Microsoft is trying to socialise the costs of its AI investments because people largely don’t care about AI and don’t want to pay for it. Microsoft really doesn’t want The Line to notice how little demand there is for AI and would prefer to force customers to pay back the billions it has already set on fire.”

Wastebook

• A functioning imposter.

• He’s been through hell, several times now, but he’s the one that keeps going back.

• “algorithms may have forced our perspective of the internet into the size of a pinhole, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The internet is a wild, weird, vast world and a testament to the wild, weird, vastness of humanity. Go off the rails.” Here.

• “Another time, Yeltsin reportedly called Clinton while inebriated and asked him to hold a secret meeting on a submarine.” History.

• “If possible, avoid taking on a role that involves changing a large established culture. The established culture always wins.” Corporation, heal thyself.

• “Embark on a voyage of enlightenment as we transcend the boundaries of conventional reporting.” xraised

• The Broken Deal == the free ride is over.

• “These days, in the capering adventures of my wild-and-restless 70s, I’m often hard-put to know if the world is old-and-boring or whether that’s just me personally.” bruces.

• “The Belgian government warned its citizens not to eat their discarded Christmas trees” Harper’s Weekly Review

• “wishcasting” Here.

• “‘Being like Socrates’ just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking ‘sauce’ that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense.” Open Socrates.

• “The Turbo America view of the 80s.” Here.

• Reinforced imposter syndrome.

Conferences

Events I’ll either be speaking at or just attending.

cfgmgmtcamp, Feb 3rd to 5th, Ghent, speaking. SREday London, March 27th to 28th. KubeCon EU, April 1st to 4th, London.

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We all know slides are a terrible way to do internal corporate coordination and planning. Slides are a prop for presenting, which means a person needs to be there. The next time you email around slides, send a recording of you going over them. Or, just write some prose instead.

There are slides that are actually prose. “Sorry about all the text on this slide,” someone will say. This is actually great! That’s exactly what we actually want: writing. If you’re going to email around your slides, try putting too much text in your slides.

Smuggle in what we all know is better: a document.