Custody Without Duty

Every business holding your data has the same incentive: keep it open enough to sell, and locked in enough to keep. Nobody is required to protect you…

Aug 1 • Badri Rajagopalan

July 2026

Your Firewall Is Yours. Your Model Is on Loan.

Hugging Face was breached by an AI, and the safety guardrails on the models it pays for blocked its own forensics. The agent that broke in had no such…

Jul 28 • Badri Rajagopalan

May 2026

Agents Don’t Flinch. Your App Was Built by People Who Did.

The whole agent-safety conversation is about permissions. The thing that failed was restraint.

May 23 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

The AI and the Engineer Both Picked the Right Database. For a Problem You Don’t Have.

Amazon’s 2007 Dynamo paper named six use cases. Most teams have none of them. Nobody asked.

May 15 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

April 2026

Eighty Queries and a Four-Second Page: The Access Database Is Back

How AI coding tools eliminated the only design review most software ever got — the slowness of writing it by hand.

Apr 26 • Badri Rajagopalan

A Test Program Designed to Lose Money Ran in Production for 45 Minutes. Knight Capital Didn’t Survive It.

Dead code behind a repurposed flag, waiting for the input nobody tested. Knight Capital had one. Most codebases in 2025 carry hundreds like it.

Apr 22 • Badri Rajagopalan

The Integration Layer Is You

Why the smartest interface you’ve ever used still can’t buy you a book.

Apr 12 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

When Platforms Own One Side: How Dominance Inverts Incentives — and What AI Platforms Will Do Next

Two-sided markets always turn opaque at dominance. With AI platforms, opacity won't be a choice. Neither will your relevance.

Apr 6 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

March 2026

The Model That Forgot What a Car Wash Is

AI models pattern-match before they reason. Your code pipeline has the same design.

Mar 29 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

The Metric That Ate the System

Why the systems we build to prevent failure become the systems that guarantee it — and why the fastest organizations have the fewest failures

Mar 22 • Badri Rajagopalan

1

OpenClaw Broke the Oldest Rule in Security Engineering

The same flaw that let Code Red infect 359,000 servers in 2001 is now running on your phone — with access to your email, your calendar, and your files.

Mar 12 • Badri Rajagopalan

3

Your Tests Work. They're Testing the Wrong Things.

CrowdStrike had the testing infrastructure. They didn't have the failure scenarios to feed it. Neither do you.

Mar 5 • Badri Rajagopalan

1