Notes on AI, Cloud, and the decisions shaping the future.
Eighteen months of my own GitHub telemetry: from a dozen commits in two months to #1 in pull requests across the whole company. An introspective report on becoming a software engineer who designs loops, reads outcomes instead of code, and has fallen back in love with creating.
ROI was invented in 1914 to compare gunpowder plants, and its power sat underneath the ratio, in the decomposition. AI ROI needs the same: one equation, three terms you can measure, and a monthly loop from the factory floor to keep them honest.
Conventional wisdom says engineers must be told what to optimize and how. Twenty years of watching says otherwise: put the number in the loop and get out of the way. AI has since made everyone a buyer, which makes knowing a condition of solvency.
Alex Karp is right that enterprises are paying for tokens that create no value. Palantir’s sovereignty paper even names the fix: own the flywheel. Then it prescribes a vault. Boyd knew better: a vault protects, a loop compounds.
Satya Nadella says the real opportunity in AI is the learning loop you build on top of the model. That loop has a fifty-year-old name: Boyd’s OODA loop. Advantage is tempo × retention. The model is rented. The loop is owned.
Why the next computing era won’t be operated by humans — and what that means for everyone who builds, buys, and runs software.
Jensen Huang’s token-budget remark got read as a compensation debate. It was actually a warning — about whether you’ve changed how you work, and whether you can even see your AI spend.
Every dollar in the cloud is an investment. On AI, unit economics, and why cost drives innovation.
This pattern – smart people underestimating compounding technological progress – wasn’t unique to encryption. It’s happening again, right now, in a different arena. AI.
Let’s address what I call the “Cloud Innovator’s Dilemma” and how to break out of it.
DeepSeek’s team reminds us that making AI production more efficient is going to drive even more consumption.
Erik joins the DiscoPosse podcast on unit economics, startup opportunities, and the "why" behind CloudZero: every engineering decision is a buying decision.
Calculating AWS total cost of ownership (AWS TCO) involves a learning curve. We cover the basics to do so and share several helpful tools.
Every engineering decision is a buying decision. Five real million-dollar lines of code — a debug statement, a timestamp, a Terraform flag, a typo — and what they teach about designing for cost before the bill arrives.
Cloud spend keeps climbing while visibility lags behind. Why cloud cost is an engineering problem, and how a FinOps approach puts engineers back in control of the spend they create.
Eric Schmidt says society doesn’t understand a world where everything is recorded forever. We do — which is exactly why your data should be your property, deletable on request.