
Free Money Got You Fired | DCD Dispatch #03
The AI transformation eliminating jobs across tech didn't start with AI. It started with a government check nobody had to pay back, and a narrative that made the cleanup easier to sell than the truth.

The AI transformation eliminating jobs across tech didn't start with AI. It started with a government check nobody had to pay back, and a narrative that made the cleanup easier to sell than the truth.

We've watched this pattern play out across four generations of enterprise IT. AI tooling is next, and this time there's nothing to repatriate.

Fifty years ago, enterprise computing lived on one box. Then the PC arrived, and we spent the next five decades distributing everything that wasn't nailed down. Client/server. Virtualization. Containers. Cloud. The mainframe became a punchline. Turns out it was just patient.

Europe is in the middle of a coordinated rebuild of the software stack out from under American hyperscaler dependency. The licensing extortion got the procurement teams' attention. The open source apps and the sovereign cloud are finally ready.

Defunct startups are selling Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads to AI labs for six figures. The privacy outrage and gold rush takes are missing the actual story: this is a data lifecycle failure infrastructure veterans solved 30 years ago, in a tier the SaaS vendors quietly excused themselves from governing.

"Look at the size of that thing." Eight orgs racing to orbit. A million satellite filings in a single week. The pitch only works if three things all go right.

Cloudflare's new lossless LLM compression tool isn't really an AI story. It's a storage architecture story applied to GPU memory.

A year ago I hit a moment every infrastructure veteran eventually hits. I didn't know what I was looking at. Here's what I did about it, and why your 20 years of experience matter more than ever if you start now.

AI agents don't come to your data estate on a schedule. They come when they have a question. Most object storage platforms were never designed for that access pattern. Here's what that gap means for your infrastructure, and why NetApp StorageGRID was quietly built for exactly this moment.

There's a new interface layer being standardized across the web right now. It's written in plain text. It's been quietly adopted by Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others. And your enterprise almost certainly doesn't have one.