Agentic sessions are where our features get built now, which makes the harness they run in a piece of infrastructure. We are building our own, called micro-zero, and connecting it to the organisation's memory. The zero is where every session starts.
Mostly discussed as flag-planting, which is a shame, because underneath it sits a specific engineering question: which capabilities could somebody outside your jurisdiction switch off, and what do you do then?
The internet was designed to route around failure. A large slice of it now routes through a handful of providers, and the failures that produces are not the ones the design had in mind.
We have photographs of engineers doing by hand, for nine years, the jobs a control plane now does: network boot, on-site backup, remote access built out of Raspberry Pis, a hundred laptops in a fortnight. The pattern in those photographs is the whole argument.
Seven years of relicensing, three forks with foundations behind them, two walk-backs and one proprietary vendor ending perpetual licences outright. Read as supply chain rather than as community drama, the pattern is consistent: the licence on a dependency is a commercial term, and commercial terms change.
A phrase that barely existed last year is now in ministerial speeches. It was introduced by the company that sells the accelerators, and the definition it carries makes buying those accelerators the proof of sovereignty.
Why public-sector IT keeps producing the same outcomes: the failure sits upstream of any engineering, in a procurement model that selects for the appearance of risk transfer.
Replace rather than modify. The idea is sound, and the benefit comes almost entirely from a social commitment rather than from any tool you can buy.
We have rebuilt the same platform layer for every client we have ever taken on. This year we stopped. Andromeda is the internal name for the component framework underneath, and the name is an argument about scale: the structure that holds a hundred machines together has to be the one that holds four.
We have finished the first monitoring stack we run for clients rather than hand over. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, exporters. The components took a fortnight; what took the rest of the year was deciding what an alert is allowed to wake someone for.
Three waves in fifteen years: virtualise the machine, abstract the machine away, schedule against a pool. Each one solved the last one's problem and quietly introduced a subtler one.
