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 19, 2026
Your dev tools bill by the meter now
The AI coding-tools market hit roughly $12.8 billion in 2026, up 151% in two years — but the bigger shift is how you pay. Vendors are dropping per-seat subscriptions for usage-based pricing, because agents now run for minutes or hours and burn real compute. Your tooling cost just stopped behaving like a headcount line and started behaving like a cloud bill. Here's how to manage it.
- business
- agents
June 19, 2026
The agent came for the back office
Ramp just raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation — up from $32 billion seven months earlier — on the bet that AI agents automate corporate finance: expense reports, invoices, bookkeeping, even initiating payments. The flashy AI demos get the attention, but the ROI that's actually landing is unglamorous back-office work. Follow the boring money — and notice what makes it safe.
- business
- agents
June 15, 2026
Resolved — but they wanted a human
Companies love the number: our AI resolves 76% of support tickets on its own. Customers are telling a different story. Across 2026, the share of people who'd rather talk to a real person rose to 85%, frustration with AI agents climbed to 59%, and more than half will abandon even a solved AI-only chat if the path to a human feels blocked. 'Resolved by the bot' and 'happy customer' are not the same thing. Here's the metric you're probably missing, and how to stop optimizing your way into a backlash.
- business
- methodology
June 15, 2026
Spending up, confidence down
Companies are pouring money into AI — budgets up sharply, some doubling year over year. And in the same breath, 51% of CIOs say adoption is already moving too fast for them to manage. That's a strange combination: the people writing the checks think the thing they're funding is outrunning them. The reflex is to read that as 'slow down.' The data says the opposite. The teams that move fastest aren't the cautious ones — they're the ones who built the guardrails first. Here's the real lesson hiding in the contradiction.
- business
- methodology
June 15, 2026
The $3.6 billion support agent
Salesforce already sells Agentforce — a platform to build your own AI agents. On June 15 it spent $3.6 billion to buy a finished one instead. Fin, the support agent formerly known as Intercom, resolves 76% of customer tickets end to end on its own purpose-built model. The company best positioned to build this decided buying a proven, packaged agent was worth $3.6 billion more than waiting to build it. That's the clearest build-versus-buy signal you'll get this year. Here's what it actually means for the rest of us.
- business
- agents
June 15, 2026
The app that burned $15 million a day
OpenAI built the most hyped AI video app in history, then quietly killed it six months later. Sora was reportedly burning around $15 million a day in compute while taking in about $2.1 million in total — not per day, total. People loved it and it still lost money on every single clip. That's the lesson traditional software never taught us: a generative feature has a real cost every time someone uses it, and 'viral' doesn't fix 'loses money per use.' Here's how to check your own AI feature before it does the same thing.
- business
- ai-native