/apocaloptimist: ai leadership in 2026

/hotfix: the week ai got real

Five AI stories from the same week. One thesis: AI just moved from pilot to production. The first /hotfix from The Forward Slash — a new short-form read from James Carman on the AI news engineering leaders actually need to track. ~20 minutes covering EY and Microsoft's billion-dollar forward-deployed engineer concession, the 83/29 agentic AI security gap, Anthropic overtaking OpenAI on enterprise revenue, Kubernetes winning the AI runtime war, and the VS Code extension that walked off with 3,800 GitHub repos.

/apocaloptimist: ai leadership in 2026

Is your AI strategy replacing people, or amplifying them? James sits down with Mike Hruska — founder of Baryons, former NIST material scientist, and TEDx speaker on what magic teaches leaders — for a human-first tour of AI leadership in 2026: the two kinds of executives this market is creating, why high-performing teams shrink to two or three when AI joins the room, what AIQ — Authentic Intelligence Quotient — actually measures, and what "apocaloptimist" leadership looks like when the calculus has changed under your feet.

/ai agents: more steak, less sizzle

* Is your enterprise AI actively shipping, or just sitting pretty in a deck? James sits down with John Capobianco, head of AI and Developer Relations at Itential and former senior network architect for Canada's House of Commons, for an engineering leader's tour of what's actually shipping in 2026: spec-driven development with Ralph loops, MCP as the next generational protocol, agents built like org charts instead of Swiss Army knives, and the open-source agent security stack. 21 minutes for engineering leaders ready to ship.

/agent guardrails: you can't blame the bot

The hardest question in enterprise AI isn't "can we build agents?" — it's "how do we let them act on our behalf without losing the company?" In Part 2 of our conversation with John Willis, co-author of The DevOps Handbook, James gets concrete about what agent guardrails actually look like in regulated environments: delegated authority, read/write/execute permissions, kill switches, and the Andon Cord for AI. Twenty-one minutes for engineering leaders who've been told to "go faster on AI" without a plan for what happens when an agent misbehaves.

/ai agents: don't be the next knight capital

The AI agent horror stories your vendors aren't telling you — and what to do before they happen to you. John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook and one of the original pioneers of the DevOps movement, joins James for part one of a two-part conversation on what autonomous AI agents are actually doing inside enterprise infrastructure right now. From vault secrets dumped to open source to entire repos deleted by a hallucinated command, John shares the real-world incidents every engineering leader needs to hear before they become the cautionary tale. Part two drops next week.