AI Brain Fry, Zombie Projects, and Gentleman Vibe Coders - Related to your interests, Monday
Also: Kratix goes hybrid, Amazon slows itself down with AI, agent cleanup crews, Mark Pilgrim pop his head up, and I go over how I use Claude code for real life, not programming.
KubeCon EU is next week, in Amsterdam, and I’m talking at VMUG Amsterdam tomorrow about what private equity does to enterprise software companies. If you’re at RAI, come say hi. AI might have written some of the below; we’re still working on keeping it under control for “helpful” content generation.
Related to your interests
When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry - In my experience, it’s not so much AI doing this as AI being a tool that makes people so productive that they experience getting a lot of shit done. Being hyper-productive is exhausting, but in a good way like (so I am told) exercising is exhausting but ultimately “good.” // Related: ‘AI brain fry’ affects employees managing too many agents - Those who reported having to maintain a high degree of AI oversight reported spending 14 percent more mental energy in the workplace, being 12 percent more mentally fatigued, and were 19 percent more likely to say they suffer from information overload in the workplace.
Amazon is determined to use AI for everything - even when it slows down work
Making agentic AI (OpenClaw) enterprise ready - Great episode with thinking about making agentic AI (here, OpenClaw) enterprise ready, using OpenShift/kubernetes of course. Also, Sally seems like a great person to trust to work on this stuff. Video version, too.
Vendors building tools to clean up messes made by AI agents - “Gartner predicts up to 40 percent of enterprise applications will include integrated task-specific agents in 2026, up from less than five percent in 2025.”
Bots may be best to handle bad reviews first - “Please hold, your call is very important to us,” but with agentic AI. // Probably a good idea, cause, like “never read the comments” is good life advice.
The case for running AI agents on Markdown files instead of MCP servers - “Every task an AI agent performs falls into one of two categories.”
Zombie Projects at work are killing productivity. AI can put them to rest
Kratix Anywhere: Cloud, On-Prem, and Hybrid Without Compromise - Thinking about platforms as bundles of capabilities, plus they add a private cloud option. This looks like the BFG 1.0 release for Syntasso/Kratix, with all the enterprise-y feels. Just in time for KubeCon.
When Developer Workflow Discipline Isn’t Enough - Selling cross-silo enterprise infrastructure stuff is very difficult: “These are platform engineering objections. And they’re coming from a team the vendor never talked to. Because the vendor optimized their story for developer adoption. They have research that tells them developers love this. What they don’t have is a conversation with the platform team that has to decide whether this can actually be operationalized inside a real enterprise environment.”
Cracking the code on corporate visibility - Internal comms and community building is difficult. // “Just to make it clear: I’m not a self-aggrandizing or egoistical person. I couldn’t care less about being recognized or noticed. However, I’m not naive in understanding that there are some strategic benefits to visibility.” // IBM Lotus had a go at it in the late 2000’s.
Jury out on whether Americans approve of datacenters - “Pew says 39 percent of respondents think datacenters are bad for their local communities.”
Wastebook
Enterprise AI ROI, current status.
“At $5,900 it’s either a very good marriage or a very optimistic Christmas list.” Claude comments on putting the Apple Studio on the Christmas list.
Gentleman Vibe Coder.
Me: “The only level of hell lower than router UIs is printer UIs. After that, tow truck drivers.” Claude: “The Boatman across the River Styx was just a tow truck driver who got promoted.”
“sure all models are buckets of statistics but ours can be sad and will soon be god” Claude Magic
He’s back! - “Hi, I’m Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as ‘Dive Into Python’ and ‘Universal Character Encoding Detector.’”
“Soul == waste of tokens.”
“Terminals Are Weirdly Accessible.” This is a phrase that was not in my bingo card for 2026 or, checks notes, any year. Terminals Are Cool Again
ICYMI
When to use AI for writing, and when it’s totally acceptable
Claude Camp - Software Defined Talk Episode 563 - I go over how I’ve been using Claude Code for NOT programming. // “This week, we discuss Claude Code for non-coders, automating newsletters and status reports, and AI tax prep. Plus, Coté finds unexpected joy in a coding assistant.”
“Feminization” and Deming - Short commentary on a link
Logoff
See you next time!