The Processing Layer Is Not a Moat

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, a friend booked a meeting room at a coworking space in Nashville and invited anyone interested in AI to come talk shop on a Friday morning. No agenda, no slides - just builders comparing notes on what’s actually working.

One of those Fridays, a conversation about MCP - Model Context Protocol, the mechanism that lets AI agents interact directly with tools like Jira, Sentry, and GCloud - sent me home to rebuild my entire engineering workflow. I wrote about that in Eliminating Waste in the SDLC. The short version: I gave Claude Code access to the same tools I use, and 12 hours of manual work per week disappeared.

Why personal AI belongs on hardware you already own

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tim Cook stepped down this week. The next CEO of Apple is John Ternus, the hardware engineer who ran the Mac transition to Apple Silicon. The new Chief Hardware Officer is Johny Srouji, who built the chips that made the transition possible. Two hardware people at the top of the company, in the same month the cloud AI labs are losing money on their best customers.

Nate B. Jones made the case that this is Apple declining the race the rest of the industry is running and lining up for a different one. I think he’s right, and I want to add what I can only add from inside it: this is the race I’ve already been running on a four-year-old machine under my desk, and the people I trust are starting to run it too.

Strategy on Thede Technologies

The Processing Layer Is Not a Moat

Why personal AI belongs on hardware you already own