AI

I wrote this article for Ippon on February 10, 2026. The enthusiasm around projects like OpenClaw—an open-source framework enabling autonomous task execution across messaging platforms, file systems, and enterprise APIs—reveals a critical blind spot in enterprise technology governance. For an entire week, I heard nothing but discussions of moltbots, OpenClaw, Clawd, and various implementations being created with these tools. But when I realized the permissions being exposed and how enterprises were approaching agent governance, I felt compelled to document this moment in AI history. ...

What is the Model Context Protocol? The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI agents to external systems. Think of it as a universal adapter that lets any AI agent talk to any tool or data source without custom integration code. Anthropic announced MCP in November 2024 and donated it to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation a month later. The adoption has been swift: OpenAI integrated it into ChatGPT, Google DeepMind uses it for Gemini agents, AWS built AgentCore around it, and development tools like Zed, Sourcegraph, Replit, and Codeium all support it. In just a few months, the community has built thousands of MCP servers. The protocol has become the de-facto standard for agent-to-tool communication. ...

Here’s what should make every security leader uncomfortable: organizations routinely deploy vulnerable code to production to meet delivery deadlines. Not because they don’t care about security. Because security can’t keep up. Over 60% of organizations update their web applications weekly or more frequently. Nearly 75% test those applications for security monthly or less. The math doesn’t work. The gap between development velocity and security validation grows wider every sprint. At re:Invent 2024, AWS CEO Matt Garman announced AWS Security Agent—not as another security scanning tool to add to the pile, but as a fundamentally different approach to the problem. ...

At an AWS Road Show this fall, Darko Mesaros demoed a URL shortener he’d built in Rust called krtk.rs. Something about watching a clean, fast URL shortener just work stuck with me. I’ve built a few of these for demos since then, but I wanted to try something different this time: build one in Python with a retro 90s vibe, and let Kiro handle most of the heavy lifting. Kiro is one of AWS’s three frontier agents announced at re:Invent 2024—autonomous AI systems that maintain context and work independently for hours. While DevOps Agent handles incident response and Security Agent conducts penetration testing, Kiro is your AI developer that takes specifications and generates production-ready code. ...

For this episode of Data Pour, I sat down with Nimish Donde—Head of Cloud Platform and Security Engineering at Truist—at Amélie’s French bakery in Charlotte. It’s a place that’s been part of the city’s fabric since 2008, growing from a single 24-hour location in NoDa (that I used to frequent during college) to four locations across Charlotte. Like this bakery, Charlotte’s tech scene has grown and evolved—and Nimish has been part of that transformation for the past 16 years. ...

At re:Invent 2024, AWS CEO Matt Garman announced something that made me stop and actually pay attention during a keynote—which doesn’t happen often. He introduced frontier agents: AI systems that don’t just help you write code or answer questions. They work autonomously for hours or days, maintaining context, investigating problems, and making decisions without you holding their hand. Three agents got announced: Kiro - your AI developer AWS Security Agent - your AI security engineer AWS DevOps Agent - your AI operations engineer This isn’t another coding assistant that autocompletes your Lambda functions. This is AWS betting that AI agents can handle the kind of multi-hour incident investigations that currently wake up humans at 2 AM. ...

For this episode, I visited the PORTAL building at UNC Charlotte to sit down with Dr. Mohamed Shehab—a professor whose mobile development course keeps showing up in conversations with students as one of the most impactful experiences of their degree. I’ve heard it repeatedly from students I’ve hired: “Dr. Shehab’s course changed how I think about building software.” When you hear that kind of feedback consistently, you have to ask what he’s doing differently. ...

For this episode of Data Pour, I sat down with Lucas Ward—one of my SWE managers and a senior technical manager at Ippon—to talk about what it actually looks like to lead people in a consulting practice while the industry is shifting under our feet. We filmed at the Charlotte Beer Garden, which feels like the most Charlotte setting possible: more taps than you can count, plus the steady soundtrack of loud cars and motorcycles rolling by. We both went with an OMB beer (Mecktoberfest) because… you kind of have to. ...

AWS re:Invent 2025 keynotes felt like AWS repeating the same move they pulled 15 years ago—democratizing something that used to be gated behind massive budgets and specialized teams. This time it’s AI. I published a full write-up on Ippon’s blog breaking down the core thread running through the keynote: scale as the prerequisite for “access,” abundance via custom silicon (Trainium), and the shift from “AI as a feature” to “AI as a production capability.” ...

We filmed this episode of Data Pour at People’s Market in Myers Park, Charlotte—grabbed drinks, hit record, and got into the kind of conversation that happens when two people who grew up in “big data” start comparing notes on where AI is actually headed. Funny thing is—this bottle shop closed down a week after we filmed. Perfect metaphor for tech, honestly: everything feels stable until it isn’t. Why James James Barney is one of my closest friends and mentors. I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s been the person I go to when I want an AI take that isn’t hype and isn’t fear—just reality. ...