Notes
Short pieces about the methodology and architecture decisions behind the AI systems I ship — specs, evals, multi-agent orchestration, LLM integration, and the discipline of directing coding agents.
June 6, 2026
Supabase is worth $10.5B because agents need boring databases
Supabase just raised $500M at a $10.5 billion valuation — doubled in eight months — and the reason is almost funny: over 60% of the new databases on its platform are now created by an AI tool, not a human. The flashy part of the AI boom is the agents writing the code. The part that's quietly minting money is the boring, reliable place that code has to put its data. That's not a coincidence — it's the whole lesson about where durable value lives.
- business
- architecture
- ai-native
June 6, 2026
Microsoft can fire its model supplier. Can you?
At Build 2026 Microsoft shipped its own coding and reasoning models — trained from scratch, with what its AI chief called 'zero distillation' from OpenAI — straight into GitHub Copilot. The richest software company on earth just spent billions to stop depending on one supplier. That's the whole lesson for the rest of us, and it costs you nothing: never let the model be the part of your system you can't swap out.
- architecture
- ai-native
- business
June 6, 2026
The best agent of the year runs on a factory floor
While everyone argued about chatbots, Foxconn quietly wired hundreds of AI agents into its production lines — reading sensors, equipment, and ERP data — and reported 80% faster root-cause analysis and 10% fewer machine failures. Nobody made it a viral demo. That's the tell. The agent deployments that actually work this year are narrow, plugged into real ground truth, and measured against a hard number. The exciting ones are still stuck in a pilot.
- agents
- architecture
- business
June 6, 2026
Copilot turned the meter on. The $20 tool was always a fiction.
On June 1, GitHub switched every Copilot plan to usage-based billing, and developers watched a single AI coding session eat a whole month's budget before lunch. The internet called it greed. It isn't — it's the meter finally being visible. Agentic AI was never a flat $20 a month; you just weren't shown the bill. Here's what that means for anyone building on these tools, and why cost has to be a design decision now, not a surprise.
- business
- agents
- ai-native
June 5, 2026
"Agent OS" is a buzzword — here's the boring checklist underneath
This month everyone shipped an 'Agent Operating System' — Fiserv, Experian, Microsoft, a dozen startups. The word 'OS' sounds like serious infrastructure, and sometimes it is. Often it's a wrapper with a grand name. The good news: there's a short, unglamorous checklist that tells the two apart — and it's the same stuff I keep writing about. Judge an Agent OS by what's inside the box, not the label on it.
- architecture
- agents
- business
June 5, 2026
Agents are arriving where a mistake is a lawsuit
This week Experian shipped an 'Agent OS' for lending — agents that decide credit, flag fraud, determine who's eligible. These are the rooms where a hallucination isn't an awkward chatbot reply; it's a denied loan, a wrong medical authorization, a court date. And one number sets the stakes: AI healthcare denials are overturned 80%+ of the time on appeal — but fewer than 1% of people appeal. Here's why regulated domains are where the whole agent argument becomes law.
- architecture
- business
- agents