Michael Coté on platform engineering, enterprise software, and AI
George Gessert ornamental plants as a form of domestication. Under that framing, Gessert argues, humans have actually domesticated more species for aesthetic purposes than we have for eating… and interesting has been just as common an aesthetic aim as beautiful has been. Also: I have a hunch: kitsch discards the interesting as a desirable aesthetic [ ]
From Articulate Rise Scenario Block
Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by meetings and process and bureaucracy. Also, from the same: Another way to say that is, AI has opened the door to humans spending more time making things instead of being crushed by [ ]
Gemini crossed a billion users, most of them just talking to it. Eight Pulitzer winners admitted to using AI. Adobe moved its whole suite inside ChatGPT, which I think is the correct move: the stuff you can reach through an agent is the stuff you keep paying for. Also: agent skills escaping the laptop, DOGE s [ ]
Adobe hasn t done well in the AI era. Perhaps the answer is this: people are happy to use Adobe, and if let them use it through AI too, they ll keep using AI. In my experience, once you integrate with AI tools (through skills, MCP servers, or just having an API that agents can use), those [ ]
The industry [used to be] far more apprehensive about AI tools than it is today, with a clearer understanding now of what uses might be appropriate — data collection and analysis, for example — and when it might not, such as in writing and editing stories in any format that might be considered for a [ ]
of course, the revealed preference would say otherwise 41% of respondents said they post to their Instagram grid once a month or less, with similar results for Facebook (38%) and TikTok (47%).* Sixty-four percent of respondents described themselves as passive users, including the majority of Gen Z and Millennial respondents. Whether correlative or causative, the [ ]
Google LLC’s Gemini artificial intelligence app has passed 1 billion monthly active users, making it the 14th product in the company’s history to reach that mark. Alphabet Inc. put the app at 650 million monthly users last October and 750 million by February. Pichai cited 900 million on stage at Google I/O in June, [ ]
From last week s Tanzu Catsup.
From: The adorable love story behind Wikipedia s high five photos ICYMI Original content published since last time. Shadow AI and Who Is Watching What the AI Bill Actually Looks Like People Actually Using It More Wastebook All things are possible, but this thing is more possible. AI Summaries I wanted to read these, but I [ ]
From Marc Weidenbaum, June 22, 2026. ICYMI Original content published since last time. Where the Developer Day Actually Goes Theoretic charts: Only three of the eight bands move. Source: The AI productivity gap by Bjorn Roche. Juniors spend more of the day on the one thing AI speeds up, so they gain more, not less. [ ]
I talked with Chris McClanahan and Purnima Padmanabhan about how the Tanzu product management team actually put AI to work. Ideation went from six to eight weeks to a couple of days, and almost none of what got them there was tooling. It was org chart work: one pod instead of hand-offs, onboarding the AI like a new hire, and rotating who plays the skeptic, because checking AI output all week wears…
Here s another, totally custom and one-off battle-map AI made for me: This was just a random encounter in a D D adventure I was doing with solo role-playing with AI (Claude). I asked it to generate a prompt to give to ChatGPT to generate the battle-map, and the results were amazing. Here s the prompt that generated [ ]
I’m old enough to remember how much time and agony we spent explaining to managers the importance of context switching for developers, and how they should have meeting free Fridays… And now the same people that we’re trying to help are bragging about how distracted they are. Bryan Ross, SDI #124. Check out this week s [ ]
Check the rest of our conversation on last week s Tanzu Catsup.
For enterprises to get the most out of their AI investments, they should think about going deep with their AI deployments, not wide, Ashraf said. Instead of applying AI across every process in an organization, find the few instances where automating workflows with an agentic system could make the most impact. And: While 78% of [ ]
If you re an entrepreneur in the venture game, you should internalize this. You either get sold for a strategic multiple (that would be Airtable at $11.7B), or you get sold for a multiple of revenue (2-5x, likely driven by your ability to turn a profit), or you reach public markets and hopefully a self sustaining [ ]
The client could copy the database, but the database structure was so complex, they couldn t make sense of it, and had been working for ten months with limited progress. My colleague s idea was to use an AI to build JavaScript scripts that scraped the UI. Since the data was presented from the UI, it was [ ]
[Forrester s] survey of leaders found 55 percent of employers regret having made tech-driven staff cuts—leading its analysts to predict half of AI-attributed layoffs [will] be quietly reversed.' And: Staffing company Robert Half has estimated that a third of hiring executives who said they d eliminated roles due to AI automation had rehired those employees or recruited [ ]
The best theory of elusive enterprise AI ROI yet: AI makes workers more productive, not organization: How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work? The answer is that these AI users are centaurs experienced [ ]
This applies to generated images, audio and text, as long as they were designed to look real. This content will get slapped with a digital watermark. The rules do not apply to personal content, so custom group chat jokes are still safe. Also, there s an exemption for evidently artistic satirical and fictional works. Meanwhile, AI [ ]
Metric Theater in AI ROI dashboards, Visa collapsing ten-person dev teams, AT T burning a trillion tokens a month, and COBOL still running 95% of ATM transactions. Plus Kubernetes won the argument and promptly became the problem.
COBOL remains a widely-used but aging programming language that works across mainframe computers and legacy operating systems, supporting more than 40% of online banking systems, 80% of in-person credit card transactions and 95% of ATM transactions, according to mainframe provider IBM. 🔗 AI shifts mainframe modernization strategy
When you speed up the SDLC process, you should collapse silo’ed teams into one team to prevent human bottlenecks based on handoffs. Here’s that at Visa: As a result of the unlocks we can realize with this new tooling, we are re-forming our product development teams that used to be 10 or more into smaller [ ]
In March, we saw 55 reports coming from the community. In April, that went to 112. April is also when we finally got access to those frontier models and started doing internal scanning, and our internal scans gave us another 370 internal reports. Michael Minella on the Spring Team. The historical baseline was about seven [ ]
AI just makes good things gooder, and bad things badder: The real work starts before evaluating tools or issuing an RFP. Marketers need defined personas, clear messaging frameworks, content standards, governance processes, reusable content, and alignment on measuring success. AI performs only as well as the context it’s given. Organizations that establish the richest context, [ ]
Encode what you should next in AI ROI metrics, don t leave the decision up to post-metrics vibes. Make the decision before making the metrics. Translate the decision into language that people use before packaging it up into quantifiable metrics. For example, Should we scale this AI feature from 10% to 100%? or Should we fund [ ]
AI amplifies your current state, moral panic edition: Perhaps intuitively and certainly as framed by popular narratives, AICs aggravate precisely these existential nerves. They simulate social processes that sustain us as a species with all our intimate bonds. And yes, that such bonds could be reproduced, even superficially, by non-conscious systems feels deeply transgressive to [ ]
The biggest change in today’s update is an overhaul of how MCP processes request metadata. Previously, AI applications sent metadata via a relatively complex workflow called a handshake. The new MCP release removes the workflow, which has several benefits. One is that it makes it easier to scale MCP applications in response to traffic spikes. [ ]
An agent skill to remove AI writing tells, LinkedIn style, and write like Coté.
Google looked at 15 million Gemini conversations and found people mostly asking about TV, homework, and government paperwork. Work is 13.5% of it, and almost none of that is trying to automate anything. Also: what the study leaves out, which is most of enterprise AI.
I m often told infrastructure people don t care about developers and platforms. But whatever your developers build above your infrastructure is a platform and they ll soon flit away from it, and now for you it s: not my mistake, and now my problem. There s more in the full talk Oren and I gave recently, Oren goes over [ ]
The return of the 3 R s!!! These were the best R s. A decade ago, Pivotal published a security manifesto, a radical call to action of sorts, via a blog post that broke the glass of traditional security culture inside of enterprise IT. The premise was faster is safer, a radical departure from the calcified, [ ]
After reading many of the below and other links in elusive enterprise AI ROI, I wrote this theory on how to be successful with enterprise AI projects. It s the usual culture cliché, but hopefully a little more practical than usual. Are PMs becoming irrelevant? Once you remove the need for a bunch of paperwork, [ ]
AI amplifies what you have: good processes get faster, bad ones get worse. Getting real enterprise AI ROI means changing how you work - structure, focus, scope.
Yes: The company has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since last October. But: Amazon, he noted, is hiring 11,000 interns and new grads this year. Resulting business value: And when you talk about entry-level jobs, number one, they re your cheapest employees. They haven t learned bad habits. You can teach them the culture, they re willing to [ ]
One company encouraged widespread vibe-coding from citizen developers but recoiled from the problems of the huge shadow IT that emerged they are now looking to build a platform to help control this work without stifling the useful tools that were produced. Part of the problem here may be simple experience with LLMs. Many in [ ]
I have been on vacation for a little while, in Finland for the third time. Finland feels different than the other parts of Europe I have been to. Perhaps it s because I spent my time there in rural Finland. But it also feels like most of Finland is rural. In that way, it feels a [ ]
Developing the secure data layers needed for large language model (LLM) use cases. Because its AI compute and data storage operate within the same strict perimeter, the credit union can confidently leverage highly sensitive member data. This makes Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) easy to implement while keeping member information completely isolated from public APIs. 🔗 USSFCU [ ]
Using short feedback loops to experiment and direct software development is always a good idea, especially with AI: What survives from Agile is the feedback logic. Short cycles still matter. Thin vertical slices still matter. Customer or stakeholder review still matters. Working software is still better than progress theater because agents can generate a lot [ ]
A new global survey of 3,750 executives and employees across 14 countries, conducted by SAP subsidiary WalkMe for its fifth annual State of Digital Adoption report, finds that more 54% of workers bypassed their company’s AI tools in the past 30 days and completed the work manually instead. Another 33% haven’t used AI at all. [ ]
Expecting AI to improve dysfunctional parts of your business probably won t go well: The strongest candidates are workflows that repeat at meaningful scale, have clear ownership, and can be measured for quality, risk, and business value. 🔗 How to manage AI investments in the agentic era
Programmers are still the dominant users of UI and, thus, drive AI use cases. The much larger market are normies, people outside of the IT department who are doing knowledge work and other tasks in organizations. I asked the AI to pull together a list of what those activities are and the momentum around them. [ ]
There s countless dependencies in other frameworks and libraries, plus the build pipeline and even production platform are part of the app. Enterprise Java applications frequently span hundreds or thousands of modules connected through Maven or Gradle builds, Spring dependency injection, Jakarta EE services, annotation processors, generated code, legacy XML configuration, container orchestration,…
Also: harness engineering teams, the Mario meeting, LinkedIn engagement data, and one million passports. By Robert Brook ICYMI From the blog since last time. DIY Platform – don’t do it my presentation at PlatformCon 2026. The Headless Lifestyle Software Defined Talk #579 “Anthropic’s 18-day Fable timeout, whether AI is actually killing jobs, [ ]
Compensation theater: Everyone cares about the compensation (base salary, bonus, and stock). That s the data they care about, but where did this pile of compensation come from? Who decided how big it is? And how is it allocated? It is a long, complicated, and large process that began over a year ago. Every meeting I [ ]
But selling anything to big enterprises is hard. You are asked to meet with a dozen people in the organization, spending hours and hours trying to explain and persuade. Half the people you meet with are skeptics who are going to argue that your service won t work. The other half are going to argue internally [ ]
Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. Across the industry Accenture is seeing soaring token spend, according to the audio. To consider: There is a [ ]
Are we going to see harness engineering teams? Yes: these are already emerging. It’s too early to say, but that feels wrong in the same way that DevOps teams were a misunderstanding of DevOps-the-movement. My belief is that while there is friction in having every team create their own harness, that friction is generative and [ ]
Yes: the work is moving from writing code to specifying, verifying, and curating knowledge. But: the code is the better spec. Their point: code is the only artifact that s unambiguous, executable, and this is the big one deterministic. A prose spec is fuzzy and an agent will interpret it a little differently every [ ]