DIY Stacks, Agent Memory, and the Great Migration - Related to your interests, Monday
Kubernetes in the age of agentic AI, ROI in ice-routing logistics, cheap-but-not-free code, mainframe modernizing, Podman vs. Docker, Claude COBOL panic.
Links! Wastebook! Background changes afoot!
Related to your interests
Why your DIY Kubernetes stack won’t survive the era of agentic AI
How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.”
Writing code is cheap now - “For now I think the best we can do is to second guess ourselves: any time our instinct says “don’t build that, it’s not worth the time” fire off a prompt anyway, in an asynchronous agent session where the worst that can happen is you check ten minutes later and find that it wasn’t worth the tokens.” // Also worth pondering: code is cheap now, but not free.
The new funnel? - Sources for newsletter traffic: “50% word of mouth, 25% search, 25% robo-brain [AI].” // Original post here.
The Deleted City 3.1 - I’m not sure what this is but I like it.
On Cobol, Mainframes, IBM and Blog Posts - Modernization requires a lot of people stuff. Also, if a company is in the legacy trap already, that was a form of self-harm that they need to address regardless of the code. // “However, the attitude of the organisation – the digital literacy – is probably the most important factor. How do they view the ongoing maintenance of their investments in technology. Are technology projects one off investments – get me from point a to point b – or has there ever been an appetite for ongoing investment. Care and feeding. Ask yourself the question how did the organisations that are desperate for this magic bullet end up in this mess in the first place?”
Child’s Play - ”Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants.”
Agent Memory Is Not A Greenfield Problem: Ground it in your Existing Data - Connect your LLMs to existing Java apps to skip several the data integration mess, and the need to recreate all your business logic. // ”An agent memory system running on the JVM doesn’t need to call an external API to learn about your customers. It can simply call its own services and repositories, benefiting from their business logic and tested behaviour. Nor does it need to go through MCP, when it can find answers faster in process. It can access the same CustomerRepository your application already uses. It can resolve a proposition like “the user prefers Italian food” against the actual Customer entity and the actual Cuisine entity your recommendation engine already depends on — in the same process, with the same transaction guarantees, through the same Spring context.” // And: “This explains the many failures. Not because AI doesn’t work, but because the approach is wrong. Companies are standing up parallel infrastructure – Python services, vector databases, hosted memory layers, prompt chains – that have no organic connection to the systems that actually run their business. The AI doesn’t know your domain. It doesn’t understand your constraints. It doesn’t share your type system, transaction boundaries or security model. It’s an alien stack that you spend months trying to integrate, and mostly fail.”
On pressing the space bar for the Cabinet - Check out the space you’re presenting in ahead of time.
Privilege is bad grammar. - The Boss Email.
Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build - “Positioned as ‘enterprise-ready local container development,’ it is currently in technical preview and available through Red Hat’s developer channels for qualified customers. Red Hat pitches the offering as a way to lower the barrier to using containers by allowing developers to build, run, and debug containers and pods without deep command-line knowledge, while still aligning with corporate platforms and policies.”
What Guy Fieri taught my son - “The politics of Flavortown are not easy to explain”; but, more importantly “Guy Fieri offers us a proposition. It is simple, but also enormously complicated. It can open up the world if we let it. Here is food. Take it, eat, and enjoy.”
Learning Opportunities: A Claude Code Skill for Deliberate Skill Development
Wastebook
“We’re so impatient with each other, bored and fractious. Yet no one will stand more than a foot away, no matter how often you ask, and we love each other too, and pet each other on the head.” Family.
“flaccid as a damp baguette” On expensive dog-food bags.
“I wish I could decide whether to be in the world [or] pull back from the world.” ftrain
“Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” ST:STG
The Great Claude COBOL Scare of February 2026.
“Critical Ignoring” Here.
“Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother” Sylvia Plath in her journals
Once again, I’m on the wrong type of drugs to enjoy this beach-DJ.
“triumphant and unforgiving trunk-rattler anthem” Stay Fly.
“an asylum for the millennials driven insane by unfettered internet access” Exploited.
ICYMI
Two Guys and Their Tokens, Software Defined Talk Podcast - This week, we discuss AI-assisted COBOL migrations, the OpenClaw Foundation, and AI killing Office. Plus, is TSA PreCheck Touchless the peak of airport efficiency?
Logoff
We were at the beach for the past week. Always nice, the beach.
If all goes to plan, this will be the last newsletter I send with substack. I’ll move all the email addresses over, so if you’re. current subscriber, nothing to worry about, it’ll just happen. Tell me if it goes bonkers somehow.
I have a bad habit of migrating stuff without much care for preserving existing links. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think having everything here at the blog will be good.
The plan is: any blog post that’s in the “Related to your interests” category will be sent as a newsletter email. I shall do just one of those a day. This means there is some duplication if you read my blog and subscribe to the newsletter. But how many people do that? I’ve accidentally-cleverly changed the link section title to “Related to your interests” (instead of “Relative”). There’s some fun “this is the new thing” signaling. And, I think instead of “Original Content,” I’ll use the section title “ICYMI” to be self-promotional material.
We’ll see.