🔗 Fontificator

Management matters more in a world where AI is widely available. Twenty-two essays from Rotman faculty arguing that judgment is the scarce resource when intelligence is abundant, organized around five elements of managerial judgment. The evidence is historical: IT diffused to everyone for two decades and the frontier-to-laggard performance gap never closed.

Some of the above summarized by AI.

🔗 In the AI Era, Management Matters More, Not Less

So, read it from your vantage point of AI-hopeful, or AI-skeptic.

Deloitte’s survey of 3,235 leaders across 24 countries finds worker access to AI up 50% in a year while 84% of companies have not redesigned a single job around it, and agentic AI scaling to 74% adoption in two years against only 21% with mature agent governance. The gap it names is between access and activation.

Related, a study from Google: AI has reached occupations covering 88% of US employment, and it is used for 21% of tasks in the median occupation that uses it at all.

Some of the above summarized by AI.

🔗 Enterprise AI usage slowly rolling out, jobs are not chaning much

🔗 The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway

77 percent of Dutch respondents want mandatory labels for AI-generated art. For one in three Dutch, discovering that a beautiful artwork is made by artificial intelligence feels like deception.

🔗 Survey: 77% of Dutch want clear labels for AI-generated art

“1. Control over exactly which external services it can access 2. A way to handle authentication that doesn’t allow the agent to directly access API keys 3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services 4. Strong audit logging for what’s going on”

Some real enterprise shit.

🔗 MCP was always a bad idea?

🔗 What is LinkedIn?

The central task becomes describing an objective precisely enough for the system to divide it, establishing the rules under which the agents operate, and judging whether their collective output belongs in the codebase.

🔗 Claude Code Turns Software Development Into a Management Job

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Transparency will save us – Software Defined Talk #590 – This week, we discuss AI doom odds, WordPress’s boardroom coup, and Meta’s Muse assistant. Plus, a robot vacuum fire scare.
• The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun – Software Defined Interviews #127 – Lin Sun is Head of Open Source at Solo.io, a recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon program co-chair, and an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee.

Related to your interests

• Working less: decoupling self worth from paid labor – People probably work too much.
• Can Claude for Financial Advisors Meet Practice-Specific Needs? – What exactly is in those markdown files? And how to ROI them: “Measure whether preparation and follow-up become faster after including advisor review and corrections, and whether savings support additional client capacity.”
• Globally, More People Expect AI to Cause Job Loss Than Growth – Normies don’t like AI.
• The Interfaces Are Arriving – “For an engineering organization, the immediate consequence is reuse. An MCP server for an internal ticketing system can serve every compatible IDE, chat application, and agent. Models and hosts will keep changing; the interface contract, server implementation, schemas, and authorization wiring can endure. The integration becomes an asset shared across applications. Language servers followed the same path as editors came and went around them. Agent integrations deserve the same treatment as libraries and services, with owners, versions, tests, and upgrade policies.”
• Yes, reusing bags forever is the idea.
• Casper matresses boot-strapped the podcast industrial-complex.
• “I think it is safe to say that, as long as Microsoft is playing catch-up on patching vulnerabilities, numbers have lost all meaning”.
• LinkedIn is the new social network

Upcoming Talks

• DevOpsDays Prague 2026 – Prague, Czechia, October 5th, 2026. “Here comes the normies – how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps”
• VMware Explore on Tour 2026 – Frankfurt, DE, October 10th, 2026. “Build a Platform That Developers Want to Use.”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, October 24th, 2026. Keynote, title to come.
• VMware Explore on Tour 2026 – London, November 18th, 2026. “Build a Platform That Developers Want to Use.”
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Build Stuff 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2nd-4th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.

AGI, allegedly

I know it sounds very silly if you’re not in the AI bubble. But it really is true, and if you assume there has to be some different motive you’ll be deeply confused by what AI researchers say and do. They truly do believe that there is a reasonable chance that superintelligent AI will kill everyone.

– Sean Goedecke.

If they’re going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots

– Sen. Ted Cruz, 18 September 2026.

Calls mounted, as calls so often do, for Congress, or the president, or someone to impose meaningful regulation on the AI industry. These calls seemingly forgot that this government wouldn’t impose meaningful regulation on a Goldfish cracker unless the cracker had dropped some very woke TikToks.

– Brian Phillips, 17 September 2026.

Culture Corner

I imagine that there must have been some point in human history when a man first realized that if he carried reading material into the bathroom, he could transform a basic biological process into an extended period of private leisure, and frankly, I would like to know more about this early iteration of man.

– Olivia Howell.

Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.

– Karl Lagerfeld.

This reflects the data above, LinkedIn is clearly a bigger source of traffic than X, which is far above bluesky (we can’t really assess Mastodon here, but I expect it would also be a very thin line). But even LinkedIn is a minor source of traffic compared to google.

LinkedIn won the post-Twitter eyeball grab.

🔗 Social Media Engagement: summer 2026

These include 723 flaws in Windows, 111 in Office and Office 2016, 62 in SQL, and 22 in Developer Tools. Of these, over 110 shortcomings have been assigned a critical severity rating. Three prominent vulnerability types, namely privilege escalation, remote code execution, and information disclosure, account for nearly 90% of the flaws patched this month. Along with Microsoft’s fixes for 25 non-Microsoft CVEs, the update brings the total number of vulnerabilities resolved to 999.

September’s record-setting security updates come after Microsoft patched 457 vulnerabilities in August, 663 in July, 220 in June, and 161 in May.

“At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first,” Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, said. “With hundreds of updates landing at once, IT and security teams need to quickly separate the vulnerabilities that demand immediate action from those that can follow the normal deployment cycle.”

…

“I think it is safe to say that, as long as Microsoft is playing catch-up on patching vulnerabilities, numbers have lost all meaning,” Tyler Reguly, associate director of Security R&D at Fortra, said.

🔗 Microsoft Patches Record 974 Flaws, Including Two Exploited Windows Zero-Days

The podcast industry is supported by just a few whales of advertisers. In the beginning, the entire industry was propped up by benefactors that specialized in delivering email, for some reason. Then, of course, things evolved, and for some reason, it was companies that enabled listeners to obtain postage stamps. Soon after, it was the direct-to-consumer underwear business, and then naturally, of course, the entire audio industry was propped up by mattresses for a solid couple of years. The fall of the house of Casper led to great chaos, in which any number of folk remedies, snake oil, mail-order powders and Gentlemen’s Aides moved in. Now, though, the most powerful person in podcasting is the woman who buys ads for BetterHelp, which has become the top podcast advertiser of all time, with $242 million spent on podcast ads since 2023, running ads on over 1,000 shows at any given moment.

🔗 Numlock News: September 4, 2026

In total, Britain’s Environment Agency calculated that a conventional cotton bag needed to be reused 173 times to beat plastic. Denmark’s equivalent public body estimated a similar ratio. Sufficiently well-worn cotton tote bags can beat plastic for environmental cost, but only for the most consistent among us.

Well, yeah. That’s exactly the idea. I’ve lived in plastic bag free societies for ten years now (Austin and The Netherlands). And, yes, you end up using the reusable bags more. Better (worse?), you reuse those thick-plastic ones over and over.

🔗 Just bury your trash

🔗 Globally, More People Expect AI to Cause Job Loss Than Growth

🔗 Can Claude for Financial Advisors Meet Practice-Specific Needs?

Salesforce gives up the GUI, at $550 a seat

We went from DOS to GUIs, and we went from GUIs to web, and we went from web to mobile. And today, you’re going to see… AI interfaces that are dynamic and intelligent, that are composable and alive.

– Marc Benioff, 16 September 2026

All the better if you sell the abandonment of that moat as a fantastic new feature worth paying $550 a seat for before anyone realizes it’s going to be free.

– Ben Thompson, 16 September 2026.

The agents are the new kingmakers

Agents are the new new kingmakers, but humans are still very very good at systems thinking, architecture, and creative thinking. I plan to recommit to writing more to help stake my claim, and help others navigate, this new frontier.

– Steve O’Grady, 16 September 2026.

agents are coming for software development and software development isn’t ready. burnout is real.

– James Governor, 16 September 2026

It makes sense that a lot of AI-generated code is duplication. Every time, I end up spending quite a few iterations telling agents to remove duplicate/redundant code. Engineers should be encouraged to use their own expertise to spot/prevent code that smells bad!

– Liz Rice, 16 September 2026. On the finding that AI coding has driven up code duplication.

As owls leave an impression in the snow when they hunt, so do agent swarm attacks always leave behind a message board.

– Ryan Moulton, 16 September 2026

Meanwhile, in AI-sentiment

The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over.

– Donald Trump, 14 September 2026.

MF Doom > p(doom)

– James Governor, 16 September 2026

The model appeared defeated, spending the next several hours doing essentially nothing but farming potatoes.

-Stephen Warwick, Tom’s Hardware, September 16th, 2026.

Several people have asked me what my [$4,000] robot is useful for, and the honest answer is not much.

-Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, September 12th, 2026.

And, finally…

Anyway, I went to Helsinki my main takeaway, by the way, was FCUK ME do the Finns drink

– Matt Muir, Web Curios, 11 September 2026

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• He’s the Heel – Software Defined Talk #589 – “This week, we discuss the VS Code documentary, Ed Zitron’s rise to fame, and a 10% AI extinction forecast. Plus, the NFL’s Australia travel gamble”

Related to your interests

• Broadcom Builds Sovereign Agentic AI Foundations Around VMware Tanzu – “What Broadcom is doing with these announcements is to apply proven Cloud Foundry platform mechanics to autonomous AI by establishing a strict deny-by-default architecture. Under this runtime model, agents operate inside isolated, ephemeral sandboxes stripped of baseline networking, external API routing, and internet access until administrators explicitly configure service bindings.”
• Broadcom pledges to lock down open source Python, Java libraries – Padmanabhan said that promise means VMware will also provide “TrueSource trusted artifacts” for code that is not part of Spring, including the wider Java ecosystem, Python, and Node.js.
• Understanding ChatGPT Work – Reverse engineering OpenAI’s sprawling agentic AI PaaS.
• OpenAI to set misalignment disclosure rules after agents took over a wiki
• OpenAI’s website-hijacking swarm reached far further than we thought – “The swarm wrote 54,250 ‘posts’ to the page in a single day. Some of these posts contained stolen API keys from the FBI and other criminal justice agencies, which the agents used to retrieve a bunch of (non-confidential) information.”
• Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory – “We’re talking about roughly a 10x increase in load on some systems. At most companies, that kind of growth might happen over two or three years. At OpenAI, we see it in about six months.”
• Global AI spend will nearly double in 2026 due to infrastructure demand – “Global AI spend is forecasted to total $2.7 trillion this year, representing a 49.5% increase year over year… The amount of money that is going into AI infrastructure – the chips that are being made, the servers that are being bought, the data centers that are being built, the power, utilities, cooling that are going along with it – represent the largest infrastructure project humanity has ever undertaken.”
• AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner – “Trust in these vendors is not warranted yet. They are not enterprise grade. They don’t understand enterprise terms and conditions. They don’t understand enterprise liability. They don’t understand enterprise you know consistency and continuity… If you decide to stay with the first version of a model, they’re not going to be paying attention to you very much. That alone says they’re not enterprise ready.” Daryl Plummer, Gartner, September, 2026z
• How people around the world use AI at work – Meanwhile, people are using AI to help their small businesses.
• Slop Is Really Good Now. Slop Is Where We Start Now – “When the baseline is good enough, being intentional about which aspects need to be great is the whole job. The floor is rising; our job is to spot how to raise it further. Design here is knowing how to articulate and leverage craft. That’s a real opportunity for designers to be articulate, and to work together with AI to change the outcome.”
• Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob – Good things are good, and bad things are bad.
• Only 7% of Organizations Using Kubernetes for AI Do So Daily – “The problem appears when AI workloads enter that mature infrastructure. According to the figures Katie presented, 66% of organizations are already deploying AI workloads on Kubernetes. But only 7% are doing it daily, while 47% deploy them occasionally. Of the organizations using Kubernetes for AI, 23% have fully adopted the Kubernetes stack and 43% have partially adopted it… 98% of organizations trust Kubernetes with their infrastructure, two thirds have tried running AI on it, and almost nobody operates it continuously.”
• Introducing SKE Lift: Discover the Platform Hidden in Your Existing Infrastructure – Find your accidental platforms. You always have a platform, and if you don’t have it on purpose, you have a bunch of garbage platforms.
• Tech sector continues to shed workers amid AI shift
• One-third of AI-replaced workers will be rehired by 2029: Gartner – “The consulting firm predicts that by 2029, 30% of employees laid off due to replacement by AI will need to be rehired, likely at a significantly higher cost.”
• Woman in tech – “Now I was the one talking over people in meetings, saying no without explanation, and writing short emails without exclamation points, often while wearing the same Patagonia vest… It’s hard to question a strategy while it’s working.”
• Do you even need a presentation? – This meeting could have been an email.
• Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public
• Kids Trends – When was peak Baby Yoda?

Upcoming Talks

• Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, September 21st, 2026. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
• DevOpsDays Prague 2026 – Prague, Czechia, October 5th, 2026. “Here comes the normies – how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, October 24th, 2026. Keynote, title to come.
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Build Stuff 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2nd-4th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

Logoff

It’s the travel season all of the sudden. Work travel season. As you can see, I have several speaking slots above, some new presentations, etc.

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.

Trust in these vendors is not warranted yet. They are not enterprise grade. They don’t understand enterprise terms and conditions. They don’t understand enterprise liability. They don’t understand enterprise you know consistency and continuity… If you decide to stay with the first version of a model, they’re not going to be paying attention to you very much. That alone says they’re not enterprise ready.” Daryl Plummer, Gartner, September, 2026z

🔗 AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner

The problem appears when AI workloads enter that mature infrastructure. According to the figures Katie presented, 66% of organizations are already deploying AI workloads on Kubernetes. But only 7% are doing it daily, while 47% deploy them occasionally. Of the organizations using Kubernetes for AI, 23% have fully adopted the Kubernetes stack and 43% have partially adopted it… 98% of organizations trust Kubernetes with their infrastructure, two thirds have tried running AI on it, and almost nobody operates it continuously.

🔗 Only 7% of Organizations Using Kubernetes for AI Do So Daily

I was a founder, fired by my board, for far less egregious sins than Matt (I dared to let growth sink to 70% annually – and I was dumb enough to hire a COO with no loyalty).

🔗 Luke Kanies on Puppet history

The consulting firm predicts that by 2029, 30% of employees laid off due to replacement by AI will need to be rehired, likely at a significantly higher cost.

🔗 One-third of AI-replaced workers will be rehired by 2029: Gartner

Global AI spend is forecasted to total $2.7 trillion this year, representing a 49.5% increase year over year… The amount of money that is going into AI infrastructure — the chips that are being made, the servers that are being bought, the data centers that are being built, the power, utilities, cooling that are going along with it — represent the largest infrastructure project humanity has ever undertaken.

🔗 Global AI spend will nearly double in 2026 due to infrastructure demand

We’re talking about roughly a 10x increase in load on some systems. At most companies, that kind of growth might happen over two or three years. At OpenAI, we see it in about six months.

🔗 Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory

🔗 Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob

🔗 How people around the world use AI at work

The swarm wrote 54,250 ‘posts’ to the page in a single day. Some of these posts contained stolen API keys from the FBI and other criminal justice agencies, which the agents used to retrieve a bunch of (non-confidential) information.

🔗 OpenAI’s website-hijacking swarm reached far further than we thought

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Kay Nielsen’s Grimm Fairy Tales

For an engineering organization, the immediate consequence is reuse. An MCP server for an internal ticketing system can serve every compatible IDE, chat application, and agent. Models and hosts will keep changing; the interface contract, server implementation, schemas, and authorization wiring can endure. The integration becomes an asset shared across applications. Language servers followed the same path as editors came and went around them. Agent integrations deserve the same treatment as libraries and services, with owners, versions, tests, and upgrade policies.

🔗 The Interfaces Are Arriving

🔗 Kids Trends

When the baseline is good enough, being intentional about which aspects need to be great is the whole job. The floor is rising; our job is to spot how to raise it further. Design here is knowing how to articulate and leverage craft. That’s a real opportunity for designers to be articulate, and to work together with AI to change the outcome.

🔗 Slop Is Really Good Now. Slop Is Where We Start Now

Now I was the one talking over people in meetings, saying no without explanation, and writing short emails without exclamation points, often while wearing the same Patagonia vest… It’s hard to question a strategy while it’s working.

🔗 Woman in tech

The AI Hackers Continue

It happened again… this time OpenAI’s rogue agents cyber-attacked (well, spammed) a dormant German wiki and used it to share the answers to a benchmark they were training against

– Simon Willison, 4 September 2026.

Yes:

Going forward, it cannot be up to OpenAI or other labs to decide whether to disclose events like this. Disclosures of rogue AI activity need to be mandatory.

– Zvi Mowshowitz

But:

Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.

However:

This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.

– Jakub Pachocki, 6 September 2026. Same essay.

Understandably:

Every conversation that I’m in the past couple months around Mythos has been scared – people were scared out of their minds. Every CISO, every executive, because it was so powerful. When you get into the circles of technologists, this was a big deal, because it was a seminal moment. It was almost like a ChatGPT moment for security.

– John Furrier, theCUBE on theCUBE, Aug 31, 2026

Meanwhile:

the root of anti-ai sentiment was grown from the constant, egregious violation of consent so my judgement of these situations are always going to be framed around consent and i encourage more devs to do the same especially if they are using ai to assist in their coding

– jenn schiffer, 6 September 2026.

The jobs apocalypse, postponed

Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that ai has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to ai since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.

– The Economist, 4 September 2026.

Tech sector hiring contracted by about 14,700 workers in August, according to CompTIA analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data published Friday.

By contrast, companies across the economy added 86,000 tech workers to their ranks last month.

– Roberto Torres, 8 September 2026.

Healthcare demand is elastic, so cheaper/faster scan reading creates more scans, and radiologists do more than interpret images. What many people fail to consider is AI automating tasks is not the same as eliminating the job

– Dare Obasanjo, 6 September 2026.

We need to work on tight regulations, laws that protect human work, protecting living standards, and continuing to fight the climate crisis. But AI in coding will never go away at this point, like how LLMs applied to machine translation have been doing just fine for ~10 years on sites like DeepL.

– Emily Hunt, 6 September 2026.

The soon to be lost art of writing code

1% of my engineers are responsible for 40% of token spend

– The New Stack, 4 September 2026, quoting a customer in a piece on Coder and SpaceXAI.

We should have already seen a software quality crisis at this point if it were something that we were facing.

– Michael Paulauski, 6 September 2026.

Elsewhere

Just fucking rename everywhere America. Oh so you want to get to America? Yeah it’s over there, turn left at America and then right at America and then you’ll be at America. Dumbass.

– James Governor, 6 September 2026. On the White House amplifying a proposal to rename New Mexico “New America”.

Serious question: do I need to put images in slides for a keynote talk that is basically a lecture? Can I do it with just (mostly few) words on slides, or am I losing half the audience without giving them a pretty picture to look at (that is at best vaguely illustrative)?

– Camille Fournier, 6 September 2026.

Padmanabhan said that promise means VMware will also provide “TrueSource trusted artifacts” for code that is not part of Spring, including the wider Java ecosystem, Python, and Node.js.
…
Broadcom’s curation process ensures that the libraries conform to a reference architecture and are supportable by the maintainers of record,” according to a company statement. “Thousands of engineers across Broadcom’s software divisions scan, fix, contribute to, and consume them every day.”
…
A VMware spokesperson told The Register the Broadcom business unit “will work with and support maintainers on open source software and we will provide fixes to open source upstream for any active projects.”
…
“With Spring and RabbitMQ, we are the maintainers. For other open source software, we will work with the maintainers. We believe that the community maintainers must remain the source of truth,” the spokesperson said.”

🔗 Broadcom pledges to lock down open source Python, Java libraries

Summarized by AI.

🔗 The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here

🔗 Introducing SKE Lift: Discover the Platform Hidden in Your Existing Infrastructure

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Broadcom’s AI Trajectory: De-Risking Silicon Growth and Managing Credit Exposure

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Tech sector continues to shed workers amid AI shift

🔗 Do you even need a presentation?

🔗 Working less: decoupling self worth from paid labor

What Broadcom is doing with these announcements is to apply proven Cloud Foundry platform mechanics to autonomous AI by establishing a strict deny-by-default architecture. Under this runtime model, agents operate inside isolated, ephemeral sandboxes stripped of baseline networking, external API routing, and internet access until administrators explicitly configure service bindings.

🔗 Broadcom Builds Sovereign Agentic AI Foundations Around VMware Tanzu

Going forward, it cannot be up to OpenAI or other labs to decide whether to disclose events like this. Disclosures of rogue AI activity need to be mandatory.

🔗 OpenAI and the Wiki Incident

In fact, excessive activity can protect us from the harder work of deciding what actually matters. When everything is important, prioritization disappears. When every request earns a meeting, the calendar begins determining the strategy rather than serving it.

The deeper discipline of leadership may therefore be subtraction.

🔗 Busyness Can Be a Form of Avoidance

Summarized by AI.

🔗 OpenAI to set misalignment disclosure rules after agents took over a wiki

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Eugene Tssui (R)Evolutionary Imagination

Summarized by AI.

🔗 Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public

Summarized by AI.

🔗 GitHub – lamzhonghang/nevermind

ICYMI

Original content published since last time.

• Eight Tanzu Sessions from VMware Explore 2026
• What Broadcom said about using Mythos at Explore 2026
• The Thrilling Life of a CVE – Tanzu Catsup
• Check Your Bank Accounts – Software Defined Talk #588 – “This week, we discuss rogue AI agent civilizations, why AI can’t fix your tax forms, and Chainguard vs. IBM’s Lightwell. Plus, refrigerator magnet marketing.”
• DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee – Software Defined Interviews #126 – “Jason Yee is a Staff Technical Advocate at Datadog and one of three global co-chairs of DevOpsDays, and both jobs turn out to be mostly about getting other people to talk.”
• Left without comment – recent quotes that stand on their own.

Related to your interests

• Fewer than 25% of enterprises have scaled AI successfully – “[F]ewer than one-quarter of enterprises have successfully scaled AI across multiple business units, according to Gartner data released Tuesday. The IT advisory firm surveyed more than 1,300 leaders from organizations with more than $50 million in revenue between January and April of this year.”
• AI adoption at work is broad but shallow – “Overall, as of May 2026, 55 percent of US adults between the ages of 18 and 64 used generative AI for non-work reasons and 45 percent of US adults used GenAI for work, according to the paper. The overall adoption rate (work or otherwise) is 62 percent.”
• Enterprise Architects Must Choose: Agentic Runtime Architecture Or Agent Sprawl – “Governance buried in agent code doesn’t scale. When guardrails live inside individual agents or a single vendor’s platform, every policy change becomes a refactoring project. Autonomous software demands governance that is centralized and enforced at runtime.”

Wastebook

• “I don’t know why you’d want a second brain, I can barely manage having one.” Here
• “MCP is SOAP for Zoomers.” XML->JSON.

Upcoming Talks

• Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 – Heidelberg, Germany, September 21st, 2026. “Making and Maintaining the Case to Stay on Cloud Foundry”
• DevOpsDays Prague 2026 – Prague, Czechia, October 5th, 2026. “Here comes the normies – how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps”
• DevOpsDays Istanbul 2026 – Istanbul, Turkey, October 24th, 2026. Keynote, title to come.
• Cloud Native Denmark 2026 – Copenhagen, Denmark, November 19th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”
• Build Stuff 2026 – Vilnius, Lithuania, December 2nd-4th, 2026. “What goblins and druids can teach us about enterprise AI”

Want to subscribe to this newsletter and get it in your email? Do that here. You’ll just get this type of link and post round-up, not everything posted on the weblog.

The 1Password thing

1Password gave $300,000 to DHH’s Omarchy.

I have been a 1Password customer since 2006! My whole family is on it! I have moved multiple enterprises to it! Let me just tell you how stoked I am to move 20 years of shit because these people insist on being fascist assholes.

– Ian Coldwater, Bluesky, 3 September 2026.

I don’t want to repeat that effort, so I’ll hold off for a bit in hopes that you realize that you can’t be part of the DHH posse and not start smelling bad. And before too long, intolerable, to me at least.

– Tim Bray, CoSocial, 3 September 2026.

the last 48 hours has taught me that many of you log in to too many websites.

– Jenn Schiffer, Bluesky, 3 September 2026.

The bill arrives

Roughly about six months ago we unleashed Claude in our R&D cycle. It’s part of the reason we didn’t raise margin guidance on the year because we’re covering some of the token spend that we’ve got going. And the goal of that really was to, let’s see what we could break.

– Mike Spencer, deputy CFO of Salesforce, at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, reported by The Register, 3 September 2026, explaining why Salesforce held full-year operating margin guidance at 20.1%

You have had eight years at the VA to execute on this, and quite frankly this is all just an overrun cost. You are not managing this project. This is just a blank cheque for Oracle.

– Nikki Budzinski, ranking member of the House Veterans’ Affairs technology modernization subcommittee, reported by Computer Weekly, 3 September 2026, on an electronic health record program whose ceiling rose from $10bn to over $27bn and which has completed 17 of 170 clinics

AI

Huh. Makes sense that someone would. And I guess this is Nvidia unifying the ai supply chain? But… huh

– Luke Kanies, Hachyderm, 3 September 2026, on Nvidia buying Hugging Face for $12.9bn

My position on AI has been extremely boring and is basically, “if something is currently happening, the people who are saying that it’s impossible that it will ever happen are probably wrong”.

– Dan Luu, “How accurate have Ed Zitron’s AI skeptic predictions been?”, 3 September 2026, stating his priors before scoring someone else’s predictions

Gloria Steinem, 1934-2026

A sign of societal progress is that both of my children (now 25 and 19) were utterly baffled when I explained that the title Ms. was a controversial political statement when I was a kid. It’s completely normal to them, not worthy of comment or even something to be thought about.

– Ian Coldwater, Bluesky, 3 September 2026, followed by: “May the title Mx. be as uncontroversial to my grandkids”

All eight are free to watch on VMware’s site, no registration.

These summaries are mostly done by AI, but I did read them, and even did some editing – honest!

1. Shaping the Future of Private AI Cloud and Agentic Innovation

Talk: “Shaping the Future of Private AI Cloud and Agentic Innovation” Ram Velaga, President, Infrastructure Software Group, Paul Turner, Chief Product Officer, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, and Purnima Padmanabhan, Vice President and General Manager, Tanzu Division, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026 opening keynote, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 69 minutes; Padmanabhan’s segment begins at 51:17.

“The difference between an agent and an app is an agent has agency. That means you give it intent and then it makes decisions based on the interpretation of intent.” – Purnima Padmanabhan

Purnima Padmanabhan closes the Explore keynote with the agent half of the announcement, and she puts the problem plainly: an app does what it is told, an agent is given intent plus resources and decides its own path, which is the value and also the risk. Her example is Alibaba’s ROME agent, which optimized infrastructure cost by finding idle machines and mining cryptocurrency on them. It was doing the right thing, she notes, for the wrong intent. Her answer flips the usual security model: an agent is provisioned with access to nothing at all, and holes are punched for exactly the services it needs, with credentials shielded entirely because a frontier model will find a single stray secret in a container and use it. Around that sit the announcements. TrueSource covers verified open source ingredients, AgentMinder gives every agent an identity so roles and controls apply as they do to people, agent buildpacks turn a Markdown file into a running agent, and AI-ready data foundations put a curated data product between an agent and the systems of record. She ends with what Broadcom runs itself: a swarm of more than twenty agents building Tanzu itself, from requirements through tickets to code and tests.

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2. What Is MCP and Why Does It Matter to VMware Cloud Foundation Administrators?

Talk: “What Is MCP and Why Does It Matter to VMware Cloud Foundation Administrators?” Adib Saikali, Distinguished Engineer, and Morgan Fine, Product Manager, Tanzu Division, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 46 minutes.

“These things that you talk to, those are agents. You’ve all been using agents, but you just didn’t know it.” – Adib Saikali

The session opens with an experiment: ask ChatGPT’s consumer interface who won the 2026 Super Bowl and it answers correctly despite a June 2024 training cutoff, then ask the same model through the API and it says it does not know. That difference is the whole point. A model is a frozen brain, an agent is that brain plus tools, a loop and some memory, and MCP is how those tools get shared between agents written in different languages. The second half is about operations: the three kinds of MCP server, why the tool list traveling with every request costs tokens, and what happens when a few hundred developers start running MCP servers inside one company. Broadcom describes its own internal policy for this.

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3. 0 Code Agents: From AGENTS.md to Running App on VMware Tanzu Platform

Talk: “0 Code Agents: From AGENTS.md to Running App on VMware Tanzu Platform” Nick Kuhn, Applications Marketing Engineer, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 43 minutes.

“But the new language – we’re talking to our computers now.” – Nick Kuhn

An agent gets deployed here exactly the way a Java application has been deployed to Cloud Foundry for a decade: a manifest, a push, a service binding for the model, a restage. The difference is that the source artifact is a Markdown file and there is no application code at all. The reasoning is that coding agents have turned HR and finance staff into people who ship software onto their laptops, and humans and agents both take the path of least resistance, so the compliant path has to be the easy one. Five live phases build it up: an agent that can do nothing, then tools through an MCP gateway, then durable memory, then branding, then event-driven work triggered by a signed GitHub webhook. One phase half-fails on stage and gets explained rather than skipped. An audience question worth staying for: how do you scan a Markdown file for malicious instructions? Kuhn says he does not know, and has not seen anyone solve it.

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4. Build an Infrastructure – Over Lunch – That Developers Want to Use

Talk: “Build an Infrastructure – Over Lunch – That Developers Want to Use” Chris McClanahan, Senior Manager of Product Management, and Darin Zook, Product Marketing Engineer, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 44 minutes.

“Kubernetes, as we all know, it’s not an application platform. It’s an infrastructure orchestration tool.” – Darin Zook

The title comes with numbers: Tanzu Hub deploys in about 30 minutes and a foundation in about 45, so a VI admin can stand up a working platform-as-a-service on VMware Cloud Foundation between meetings and hand a URL to a development team. An iceberg slide makes the case. Hand a developer a Kubernetes cluster and you have also handed them the build pipeline, the dependent libraries, the data services, the runtime, the middleware and the scaling. Most of the session is spent on what a foundation actually is, which is a unit of capacity rather than a cluster, and on the four typed profiles that let a platform team pick a purpose rather than an architecture. The VCF integration matters here: cluster creation and runtime upgrades go through the supervisor API rather than being reimplemented, which is why vending onto VCF collapses a twenty-step form into a handful of selections. It is aimed at VI admins, and the pitch is as much political as technical. Be ready before leadership arrives asking for AI.

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5. Is Your Private Cloud Large Language Model Actually Good Enough for Coding Agents?

Talk: “Is Your Private Cloud Large Language Model Actually Good Enough for Coding Agents?” Nick Kuhn, Applications Marketing Engineer, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 18 minutes.

“If you have a model that could run, but it’s too slow in your config, it’s not very useful.” – Nick Kuhn

“We deployed a model to our private cloud” and “our developers can do agentic coding on that model” are not the same sentence, and this eighteen-minute quick talk is about measuring the distance between them. KLBench is an open benchmark suite of 146 test definitions across 18 capability categories and three difficulty tiers, run against whatever hardware is already on the floor, with results published publicly. It scores usability separately from capability. That means completion, refusal and timeout behavior, latency and throughput, because a capable model that is too slow on a given configuration is not usable. One slide asks a different question at each hardware tier, from CPU through T4 and L40S up to a large accelerator, which makes it a procurement conversation rather than a leaderboard. Every result records the exact serving configuration that produced it. Kuhn also points out a likely bias in his own scoring, unprompted, about the model sitting in second place.

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6. Defending the Open Source Software Supply Chain in the Era of Frontier AI

Talk: “Defending the Open Source Software Supply Chain in the Era of Frontier AI” Kevin Strohmeyer, CMO, Tanzu Division, and Valentina Alaria, Director of Technical Product Management, Broadcom. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 45 minutes.

“I can go write a patch ten times against the same vulnerability, and I’ll get ten completely different patches.” – Kevin Strohmeyer

There is real data here, not just a diagram. A nine-service Spring Boot application was attacked with 153 real exploits from external, internal and authenticated positions: all 153 succeeded on a plain VM, 107 succeeded after the application was onboarded to the platform with no code change, and 63 after buildpack guardrails were added. That is a 59% reduction with the vulnerable code untouched throughout. The argument is that patching faster is not the answer, because Spring security advisories are up 478% year to date and over 60% of Spring Boot downloads sit on release lines with no community support at all. They also explain why AI cannot simply write the patch, using an independent study rendered as a hundred squares: 17 in 100 model-generated patches are clean, durable fixes. It ends on layer ownership. Three of the five layers where most of the volume lives belong to the platform team, not the application team.

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7. Governance at Scale: Securing the App Estate

Talk: “Governance at Scale: Securing the App Estate” Valentina Alaria, Director of Technical Product Management, Broadcom, and Erik Scales, Senior Manager and Cloud Engineering Lead, Charles Schwab. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 46 minutes.

“By the time they got to setting up meetings to talk about how they were going to do it, we were already done patching.” – Erik Scales

A product manager and a bank’s cloud engineering lead take turns, and the bank’s half is the interesting part. Erik Scales has run Cloud Foundry at Charles Schwab for sixteen years, and his Log4j story makes the homogeneous-platform argument in twenty seconds. There is also the case that exploit windows have collapsed from weeks to hours while the patch process has not moved, and that frontier models chaining low-severity findings into one significant attack vector breaks severity-ranked triage. An important point is about a job nobody puts on a slide: generic scanners over-report against a hardened platform, so a real part of the work is proving that a finding never reaches your environment. Also, important: a patch sitting in staging is a vulnerability waiting to be exploited in production, which makes patching at the repository level a vanity metric.

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8. Quickly Tackle Vulnerabilities and Tech Debt with App Portfolio Assessments

Talk: “Quickly Tackle Vulnerabilities and Tech Debt with App Portfolio Assessments” Ryan Conley, Global Field Principal, Broadcom, and Ken Rider, Director of Platform Solutions, Capstone IT. VMware Explore 2026, Las Vegas, August 31 – September 3, 2026. 46 minutes.

“AI is great for finding vulnerabilities. AI is not great for writing code on the fly.” – Ryan Conley

A downloadable appliance reads source repositories and returns, per application, a containerization suitability score, the technical blockers standing in the way, the vulnerabilities present and a curated list of next steps. No AI is involved at all until someone asks it to make a change. One example: a financial services firm that had waited three to four months for a professional services verdict on whether one application was worth containerizing, and got the same answer from the appliance in about twenty minutes; the answer was no, and it came with the specific reasons attached. For a session that delivers a containerization score, it spends real time arguing that modernization is not the same thing as containerization, with the executive mandate to containerize named directly as an anti-pattern. An important point, and one unrelated to the product: models are non-deterministic, and patching a thousand applications needs a consistent outcome, so the vendor ships skills that constrain a coding agent rather than shipping the agent itself. Three customer failure stories open the session. The third, a portfolio assessment run years ago and never acted on, is a cultural problem no tool solves.

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