The four questions Chicago wouldn’t let go

Nine seconds. That’s how long it took an ungoverned AI agent to find an over-scoped token and wipe a production database. This was how Tyk’s Mark Gurvis opened our recent LEAP on Tour event in Chicago. What followed wasn’t a polite Q&A. The room split into working sessions, insurance next to consumer goods next to […]
The CC button is older than you think

We’ve built this machine before. We just keep giving it a new name.
The SaaS Hangover: How convenience created dependency

For the past decade, the answer to almost every enterprise software question has been the same: Put it in the cloud. Buy it as SaaS. Let somebody else worry about it. It was convenient. It was fast. And, most of the time, it made perfect sense. But convenience has a habit of becoming a dependency. […]
Build the crane

We signed a new customer recently, because their own customer demanded API access to their platform…
Read-only agents are still a data leak

“It can’t mutate prod” isn’t the same as “it can’t hurt us.” That’s the line I want platform teams to print out and tape somewhere near the Kubernetes dashboard before the next wave of agent demos arrives with a cheerful chat box and suspiciously broad permissions. CNCF recently promoted a walkthrough for running a Kubernetes-aware […]
If you can’t revoke your agent, you don’t have autonomy – you have unattended traffic

If your agent can’t be revoked, it isn’t autonomous. It’s unattended. That is the bit I think we are politely talking around while the “AI gateway” confetti cannon goes off in the background. And to be clear, I’m not dismissing the risk. Quite the opposite. I think the risk is real. I just don’t think […]
Remember Consignia? No. That’s the point.

In a market you didn’t create, your clever new vocabulary isn’t an asset. It’s a liability.
Two Roman horses decided your tech stack

This week one of my team asked for help. A big enterprise, trying to pick one API management platform. And a group inside is still defending a platform first built more than twenty years ago.
German Ciphers, Telegrams and Data Sovereignty

In January 1917, Germany sent a secret telegram. It went to Mexico. The offer: join the war against the United States, and you can have Texas, Arizona and New Mexico back. The Germans were careful and they put it in cipher. However, their own transatlantic cables had been cut, so they sent it the only […]
We hired an agent. It onboarded like everyone else.

In 1935, the US Army held a fly-off to choose its next bomber. Boeing turned up with the Model 299. It was the clear favourite. Bigger, faster, carried more than anything else on the field. The contract was as good as signed. On the demo flight, it took off, climbed, stalled, and crashed in a […]