AI everywhere: the ketchup-on-everything syndrome

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every so often, the tech industry latches onto a word and repeats it until it’s completely hollow. First it was “cloud”, then “blockchain”, then “web3”. Now the magic word is “AI”. If you don’t put “AI-powered ” on your product page, it looks like your product comes in black and white with a Nokia 3310 thrown in for free (for my younger readers: those were the indestructible phones that only made calls and lasted a week on a single charge).

Microservices, Monoliths, and Other Mythical Creatures

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some architecture decisions are made calmly, with data, over a nice cup of coffee.

And then there’s real life, where you pick your tech stack the same way you pick a favorite sports team: because you saw it in a cool conference talk, because some big-name company uses it, or because someone tweeted that “if you don’t have 80 microservices running on Kubernetes, you’re a dinosaur.”

Next thing you know, you’ve gone from a lovable monolith — a little messy but functional — to a circus of services where nobody really knows what talks to what, your cloud bill is terrifying, and the only microservice running flawlessly is the one that charges you at the end of the month. All because, at some point, somebody stopped asking the only question that actually matters:

Engineering on I am Lino

AI everywhere: the ketchup-on-everything syndrome

Microservices, Monoliths, and Other Mythical Creatures