This is a new talk of mine going over how platform engineers can support AI. Well, it’s more about how we don’t exactly know, but we can speculate based on a handful of early use cases. Here’s the slides if you’re into that kind of thing.

Here’s the 🤖 on my key points:

• Platform engineering for AI is mostly running another middleware service - same infrastructure tasks as always, plus model registries and figuring out who handles AI safety evaluations.
• Put a gateway/proxy in the middle immediately - the eternal computing lesson we relearn every five years: never let developers talk directly to services or you’re stuck sending angry emails.
• Three new types of customers for platform teams - developers who want AI coding help, “normals” using internal ChatGPT for business tasks, and the mythical “AI embedded in applications” unicorn nobody can actually find.
• Platform-as-a-product thinking applies here too - make something developers actually want to use, get lawyers and security on your approval board to avoid the old “center of killing dreams” problem.
• Experiment rapidly when you don’t know what you’re doing - which is right now for everyone, so build fast feedback cycles rather than one perfect thing that takes forever and turns out wrong.

Check it out, and tell me if you have any things you’ve learned, heard, done’d, etc. on the topic.

When the AI policy board is slowing everything down youtube.com/shorts/Xq…

From a longer video on avoiding resume driven development when building your own internal developer portal.

Somewhere between 40% and 60% of apps run on private cloud, you just never hear about it.

Let’s get the AI to build D&D adventures for us with a Model Context Protocol Prompt. I haven’t found much value in MCP Prompts until now. What makes them excited is when you use them a “recipe” to chain together other tool calls. In this episode of my MCP programming series, I show you how to make two MCP Prompts. First, a simple one that boot-straps playing D&D. Second, a more complex one that pulls together an adventure overview using multiple tools and “reasoning.” I think the result gets to a type of agentic AI.

💾 Code for this project: github.com/cote/Easy…

📹 More videos on D&D with MCP: www.youtube.com/playlist

The AIs are good at being a Dungeon Master for Dungeons & Dragons, but their memory is limited. How can you make sure they don’t forget all that loot you just got, or ensure that cobbler back in the village remembers the type of boots you orders and paid for up front? I’ll show you how to use Model Context Protocol (MCP) to create a DM Journal. This is done by writing an MCP Server tool that write journal entries and then an MCP Server Resource that allows you to read them. It’s just files, but it’s a good excuse to learn some agentic AI coding in Java, with the help of Spring AI.

💾 Code for this project in the EasyChatDM repo.

📹 The rest of the videos in this series.

Not only can you give more direction to the AI when you’re playing solo D&D with it, you can start to understand how it thinks. I walk through how to use MCP Server tools to enhance solo roleplaying with Claude (and ChatGPT, etc.) and how to get extra information about how the AI is thinking. Also, I show you how to do logging despite the weird setup Claude Desktop requires.

More generally, you get to see why doing more documentation is important for agentic tools like Model Context Protocol. You have to shift from thinking like a programmer making APIs to thinking like a prompt engineer having a conversation with the AI.

I use Spring AI’s Model Context Protocol support to write these tools in Java.

💾 Code for this project in the EasyChatDM repo.

📹 The rest of the videos in this series.

Playing D&D with ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever is fun. But sometime you want more control over how it behaves and what it does. Check out this video for a quick tutorial on creating an oracle plugin for Claude. This “plugin” is a Model Context Protocol Server written in Java using Spring AI. Once you create the MCP Server, you can hook the oracle into Claude which will use it while you play as a simple yes/no oracle. This is a simple example that will show you how to get everything setup with Java and Spring AI to start making MCP Server tools. Keep an eye out for the rest in the series where I’ll make much more complex and fun tools.

💾 Code for this project in the EasyChatDM repo.

📹 The rest of the videos in this series.

I’m always telling my marketing friends that they should do more newsletters. They have so many objections and hurdles - mostly self-imposed ones. Here’s why I think they’re good, easy, and how to come up with things to put in them.

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That’s it for today. Like and subscribe, hey guys.

(I should have made that full room video in black and white, maybe with a glitch and fast-rolling time code. But, what are ya gonna do?)