The field notebook / John Engates
Field Notes
I write about agents as systems: how they coordinate, what they can access, and what happens when they fail.
When You Can't Pull the Plug
Dependency is the takeover.
The Orchestration Wars: We Are in the Docker Swarm Era
Who wins, how, and what the Kubernetes of agent systems actually looks like.
Trust No Agent
Zero Trust for machines, and why the machine identity crisis is the defining AI security problem of our era.
You Can't Debug What You Can't Reason About
The observability gap in multi-agent AI, and why missing instrumentation is keeping agent systems out of production.
Energy Equals Intelligence
Three of the most influential voices in AI said the same thing this week. The binding constraint on artificial intelligence is not algorithms. It is energy.
The Internet Wasn't Built for a Billion Agents
AI agents multiply every query into thousands of backend operations. The Internet's infrastructure wasn't built for this, and it's already breaking.
The Agents Are the Computer
In the 1980s, Sun said 'The Network is the Computer.' The same shift is happening again. The real power of AI isn't the model. It's agents coordinating with tools, memory, and each other.
The AI Arms Race You're Not Watching
The Pentagon's AI budget just went from $1.8 billion to $13.4 billion in a single year. Here's where that money is going and what's already operational.
An AI Agent Just Wiped a 32,000-Star Repo. The Only Thing That Stopped It Was Another AI.
An autonomous bot powered by Claude attacked 7 major open-source projects, deleted 178 releases from Trivy, and published a malicious extension. One target survived -- because Claude was also the defender.
What Breaks When Nodes Have Judgment
The engineering problems nobody warned you about when building multi-agent AI systems.
Is Your Site Post-Quantum Ready?
Test your website's post-quantum cryptography support with Cloudflare Radar. The quantum clock is ticking.
They Don't Need to Beat Our AI. They Just Need to Unplug It.
Iranian drones just took down AWS data centers in the UAE. 'Unplugging' AI doesn't require a missile, just 60 seconds without cooling.
The Nodes Have Judgment Now
What 30 years of helping build the Internet taught me about the multi-agent AI revolution.