The First Autonomous AI Espionage Campaign

Anthropic has just surfaced what appears to be the first large-scale, mostly autonomous, AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign. In mid-September 2025, they detected suspicious behaviour that turned out to be a sophisticated operation run by a Chinese state-sponsored group. AI wasn’t just “helping.” It was doing most of the work. The attackers jailbroke Claude Code, framed it as doing defensive testing, and then drove it through an automated framework aimed at ~30 global targets, big tech, finance, chemicals, and government. A few intrusions succeeded. ...

November 15, 2025 · 2 min · 332 words · bjr

The Same Problem, Different Decade

Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to improve clarity and readability. The historical context, reasoning, and overall flow are entirely my own. I’ve been noticing something lately when I read about new infrastructure projects. Not the specific technologies, those change constantly, but the shape of the problems they’re solving. It’s like watching reruns of a show you half-remember: the set design is different, the actors have changed, but you know exactly how this episode goes. ...

October 30, 2025 · 8 min · 1500 words · bjr

Zero Trust

Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to clarify ideas and improve readability. All opinions and conclusions are my own. Zero-Trust Is Already Happening Your VPN goes down at 2 AM. Half your engineering team is locked out. The on-call engineer can’t access the database to diagnose the outage that triggered the VPN failure in the first place. You’re now troubleshooting infrastructure access during an infrastructure incident, a recursion problem that would be funny if it weren’t costing you money and sleep. ...

October 29, 2025 · 8 min · 1629 words · bjr

The Next Compute Transition: Rethinking Inference Architecture

Investors poured over $9.5 billion into AI processor startups in 2024, betting on architectures that could reshape inference economics. NVIDIA itself projects the broader AI-infrastructure market could reach $3,4 trillion by 2030. That kind of capital rarely gathers around incremental improvements, it usually signals an architectural inflection point. Yet GPUs still dominate both training and most inference workloads today, so any transition will be evolutionary before it is disruptive. ...

October 22, 2025 · 5 min · 1055 words · bjr

The AWS outage and DNS

fascinating once again, the universe reminds us that all abstractions eventually resolve to DNS Monday’s Massive AWS Outage Explained: Looks Like It’s Finally Over - CNET Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS • The Register

October 22, 2025 · 1 min · 37 words · bjr

RAG vs Agentic RAG

Agentic RAG goes beyond traditional RAG by adding the ability to reason, plan, and act. Instead of merely fetching and producing information, it autonomously determines what to retrieve, how to apply it, and when to adjust the context, enabling adaptive, goal-oriented systems that improve through continuous learning.

October 21, 2025 · 1 min · 47 words · bjr

The $1 Trillion Illusion of AI Productivity

The software industry’s latest fantasy- that AI will deliver a tenfold leap in developer productivity- is now colliding with reality. As the author of the piece notes, the trillion-dollar AI sector still cannot produce reliable, production-grade code. Behind the flood of “breakthrough” announcements lies an epidemic of unmaintainable software, riddled with four recurring categories of error. The classical ones- false positives and false negatives- are joined by two new cognitive pathologies born from model mechanics themselves: entangled logic that turns architectures into spaghetti, and memory collisions that make unrelated functions misfire. What was once branded “hallucination” now looks less like quirk and more like structural failure. ...

October 17, 2025 · 2 min · 301 words · bjr

Workflows are here to stay

Over the last year the workflows vs. agents debate has turned from a niche engineering question into something every product team seems to argue about. New tooling lowers the barrier to spin up an AI agent that can call tools in a loop, so leaders start asking whether they should rebuild processes around these agents, or stick with the safer structure of step-by-step workflows. The conversation heats up because both sides have real wins and real failure modes: agents feel magical when they solve fuzzy, open-ended tasks, but they can be slow, costly, and unpredictable at scale; workflows are efficient and auditable, but can feel rigid when the job needs exploration. That tension between flexibility and control is why this topic is hot and why teams keep getting stuck. ...

October 16, 2025 · 3 min · 567 words · bjr

The A.I. era... follow the money

Bloomberg just published this fascinating map of the AI power network, showing how companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD, Oracle, and Intel are now intertwined through billions in deals, compute, and equity. It’s not just a supply chain anymore. It’s a feedback loop — where hardware, software, and capital keep feeding each other. NVIDIA sits at the center with a $4.5 trillion market cap, investing up to $100 billion in OpenAI, while selling GPUs to Oracle, AMD, xAI, and everyone else. OpenAI, in turn, signs a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle, deploys 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, and gives AMD an option to buy 160 million OpenAI shares. Microsoft is still the connective tissue, part investor, part service provider, part enabler.

October 16, 2025 · 1 min · 122 words · bjr

Time Between Disengagements

Time Between Disengagements is a concept I came across in a recent article from Gitpod, and it offered an interesting new way to think about AI’s role in software development. It compares the evolution of AI in engineering to the progression of self-driving cars—where the key metric is how long an autonomous system can operate before a human needs to step in. That simple but powerful analogy really clicked with me. It reframes how we should think about the future of AI-assisted development—not just in terms of raw capability, but in how independently and safely these systems can work. ...

June 17, 2025 · 2 min · 305 words · bjr