I like this platform as a product paper a lot. You should check it out if you’re into DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, whatever. It’s also available in O’Reilly if you have that subscription and don’t want to lead-in yourself.
Here’s some fun parts:
Adopting a product mindset starts with continually evaluating the business context to manage “build versus buy” decisions. Contextual factors such as scale, compliance requirements, or the diversity of the workforce skill base and technology stacks often require organizations to opt out of an off-the-shelf solution and instead invest in a set of integrated capabilities designed for its specific needs.
Posts in "tech"
Spending less money on IT is always the priority, and how to get around it
The survey of more than 200 CFOs, taken during August 2025, showed that 56% of CFOs rank achieving enterprise-wide cost optimization targets in their top five. Gartner CFO survey.
The easiest way to show the value of IT is to show how it means spending less money. There’s occasional moments where “ROI” is achieved by existential dread - the tech industry is going to Blockbuster you, etc. But those are largely made up, at the least, way overblown.
Highlights from that OpenAI "The state of enterprise AI report"
On average, ChatGPT Enterprise users attribute 40–60 minutes of time saved per active day to their use of AI, with data science, engineering, and communications workers saving more than average (60–80 minutes per day).
That’s the headline grabbing piece from the recent ChatGPT for work study. The theory take-away from that is that the more you use ChatGPT, the more productive you are.
Also, the current use revolves around chat and coding.
People don’t read vendor1 PDFs anymore. This is oft said. Is it true for you?
Should anyone be writing white papers anymore? Or should we (1) do short form pieces from social media micro-content, blog posts, advertorial, (2) do a lot more videos and podcasts (by that, I mean interview videos that happen to have an RSS feed), (3) make sure we have content to feed the AIs because people are getting their research from AIs? (4) Something else?
Put another way: what are the last three vendor PDFs you read that were useful?
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“vendor” - you know, cloud companies, software companies…but also consultants and even industry analysts. Maybe “white papers” from any source, really, that are not the actual “enterprises” doing the work. ↩︎
If you have PowerPoint pillars, your organization probably has strategy BO. From The Octopus Organization.
Agile fails quickly if you don’t follow the practices.
If I could only give one piece of feedback for the rest of my career on all tech marketing content it would be this: rewrite to describe the activities done, not the outcome achieved.
Claude Skills are top on my list of “important things no one is talking about” for this year. They’re both an AIPaaS and showing a new programming model and mindset. The educational angle (“View Source”) is a good take.
🔗 What MCP and Claude Skills Teach Us About Open Source for AI
The original is long, so I finished reading it with a summary from one of the discussed robots:
🤖 MCP, Skills, and the Architecture of Participation in Open Source AI
Summarized by AI.
Open source AI is not just about releasing model weights. True innovation comes from an architecture of participation, where developers can inspect, modify, and share small, composable components. Historical breakthroughs like Unix, Linux, and the early web succeeded because they allowed modular contributions—viewing source, remixing, and building on others’ work—rather than requiring deep engagement with the most complex layers of the system.
Anthropic’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Claude Skills embody this participatory model. MCP servers let developers give AI systems new capabilities via simple, inspectable interfaces to data, APIs, and tools. Skills are atomic, shareable instructions—bundled expertise that can be read, forked, and adapted. This is the opposite of OpenAI’s GPT “apps,” which live in a closed, app-store-like ecosystem where internals can’t be inspected or reused. Skills and MCP servers are components, not products, and their openness allows a collaborative ecosystem to flourish.
The long-term potential lies in creating “fuzzy function calls”—reusable, human-readable instructions that formalize what LLMs already understand. Just as early compilers and UI toolkits let developers move “up the stack,” MCP and skills will let participants focus on architecture and composition rather than raw code generation. This evolution could preserve mass participation even as layers of abstraction and complexity emerge, as the web did with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks.
The economic stakes are high. Today’s AI market is extractive: training data is used without recognition, value capture is concentrated in a few companies, and improvement loops are largely closed. MCP and skills could enable participatory markets, where contributions are visible, attributable, and shareable. To reach this future, the AI community must embrace open protocols, inspectable artifacts, new licensing models, and mechanism design that fairly rewards contributors and encourages ecosystem growth.
The future of open source AI will be decided at the interface layer, where ordinary developers and even non-programmers can create reusable skills leveraging their own expertise. If AI development mirrors the open web instead of proprietary app stores, it could become a generative ecosystem that expands opportunity rather than consolidating power.
Links
🤖 What MCP and Claude Skills Teach Us About Open Source for AI - Explores how MCP and Claude Skills could enable a participatory, open-source AI ecosystem similar to the early web, contrasting it with closed, app-store-like approaches.
Summarized by ChatGPT on Dec 3, 2025 at 7:04 AM.
Getting ready for an AI app influx. Did we learn from the digital transformation era?
Will IT get ahead of the chaotic introduction of a new technology, AI, into their organization? Probably not, they rarely do, creating Shadow Whatever the New Tech is. But, for those that do, here’s Tony and I’s recommendations. Platform engineering’s etc.
This our second Tanzu Talk livestream. We do it weekly on Tuesdays at 4pm Amsterdam time/10am Eastern time.
🔗 Getting ready for an AI app influx. Did we learn from the digital transformation era?
An XDG library for Java - xdgj
Each time I write a small utility, either a command line one or for an MCP server, I need to store state and config in the file system. I’ve come up with many ways of doing it. You know, like, you want to store a default LLM prompt in a file. You want to store a D&D play log in a file, or a bunch of markdown files for D&D monsters.