September Posts

In this episode of The Deep Dive, the hosts unpack four September 2026 posts by SRE veteran Eri Bastos. They start from a blunt picture of enterprise IT: business analysts, architects, developers, QA, and operations passing work over the wall, a line that now collapses into a prompt on one laptop. Made to Measure puts a cost on that change. In the late 1990s Bastos spent weekends compiling kernels and tuning bash prompts to the pixel, because a personal machine was something you paid for in hours. Omarchy, DHH’s Linux setup, ships AGENTS.md and skills files so a model has a local map and can make the change from a description. He tells the same story from an old job, where a department repaired a custom spreadsheet parser almost every month for one large customer. An agent builds that parser in about fifteen minutes.

The One-Person Team follows that parser into the org chart. One person holds the requirement through production and uses agents as the specialists. The hosts call the alternative the telephone game: by the fifth handoff, the original problem is gone. About Soft Skills tells the same lesson three times. Trashing Red Hat cost a bank job, calling MySQL a toy cost a DBA the offer, and a flat technical answer about Red Hat worked at a Google lunch, at a company that does not run it. A former boss called that miss the most correct wrong answer. Nobody Asks About the Power Tools answers the thread about disclosing AI use. The buyer wants the driveway clean and the house standing, which is Levitt’s quarter-inch hole. Say how it was built when the client will own the code, or when provenance and regulated data are part of the sale. The episode closes by asking which broken daily workflow you have kept because a fix looked too expensive to attempt.