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I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test... - Barry Hess

2026-04-10T19:13:28.000Z

I did a telehealth call this week about some third-party blood test results. As with most things in your forties, the cure is to lose some weight, exercise, and get better sleep. For whatever reason I feel like this might be the year I pull it off. 🤞

My brother-in-law told me about a woman who was arrested and jailed for over five months based on AI facial recognition. I definitely was listening to him talk about it and saying, “There must be more to this.” Nope, it appears there is no more to it. Yet. There’s gotta be more to it, doesn’t there? Please?!

At the moment I’m choosing to be blissfully unaware of the politics around any of this and just enjoying the pictures.

2026 has found me fully on the “coding with agents” path. One interesting side effect I’ve found is that my typing skills are diminishing. I don’t think I was typing that much code per minute before going full LLM. You don’t type as if you’re writing a novel when coding, no matter what Hackers may have made you think.

All I can fathom is that maybe the infrequency of those funky finger maneuvers to hit various odd coding characters has changed the spatial relationship between my hands and the keyboard? Maybe I’ll have to relearn the dance? Maybe I should increase my time journaling, blogging, and writing in general to recover my skills?

I was a bit sad reading this old, long read about the death of video stores. (h/t Silent Listening)

I’ve been getting better at limiting my online time to more intentional things. Not amazing, but better. YouTube and its mix of usefulness and brain rot has still been hard to step away from. However, they’ve been working on solving that problem for me by doubling down (literally in my estimation) on ad breaks. Add to that an advertiser overlay that requires two-tap dismissal post video ad, and I’m really getting put off from the platform. We shall see.

Have a listen to Mei Semones duet with her dad playing euphonium. Yes, I used to play euphonium. If any of my daughters are reading this, just start a recording career and I’ll get back in the woodshed with a euphonium.

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Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T20:38:46.000Z

We got most of the TeamSPS folks at MnTech Connect together for a group photo.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T20:37:50.000Z

Great live demos at The Agentic Workflow: A Live Demo of Autonomous Execution Across the SDLC from TeamSPS at MnTech Connect.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T20:36:28.000Z

Great session on AI transformation from Matthew Green of Accenture at MnTech Connect today.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T15:56:38.000Z

Great session on Shipping a Customer-Facing Al Agent: Lessons from Moving Fast Without Breaking Trust with Valentin Kornukh this morning. Shared learnings we have from creating SPS MAX!

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T13:34:08.000Z

Looking forward to a meaningful day of learning at today’s MnTech Connect event! Many good sessions on AI transformation including two led by TeamSPS! 🎉

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-09T13:30:45.000Z

“Your EFI shell is showing…”

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-09T13:13:25.000Z

New terms I’m pondering/exploring/incorporating:

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-09T12:54:14.000Z

The Master List | Hunter Gatherer 21C

It is just one list, not a separate work list and a separate home list; not a notebook and scattered Post-its. Not multiple apps. Why? Because fragmented lists do not provide the all-important overview and perspective you need to decide your priorities.

I, too, have been working this way for years. I mention it in my post on how I use 3×5 cards here and there I also mention the Mindsweep prompts I use for capture.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-07T03:25:37.000Z

A two bottle night.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-07T00:59:35.000Z

Brian Cox: The terrifying possibility of the Great Filter – YouTube

It’s about 20 minutes long so I won’t embed it here but boy do I love stuff like this.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-06T16:11:51.000Z

One of America’s last true secret societies: The Mardi Gras Indians | 60 Minutes – YouTube

True NOLA natives know this is where and how the real Mardi Gras happens.

Ever wonder what the song Iko Iko is about? It’s about this.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-06T15:20:27.000Z

Paul Cantrell’s Mastadon Thread on how Minnesota responded to Operation Metro Surge is an absolute must read

Only one thing was crystal clear: nobody, absolutely nobody, was coming to save us… We’re it. We’re all we’ve got. If we don’t stop fascism from completely engulfing the US, then nobody stops it.

Thanks so very much to Jarrod for sharing it.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-06T13:21:50.000Z

I’m creating some jukebox playlists.

Two songs per artist (okay George Jones gets six). If possible, the actual a and b sides go on the playlist (not critical). 200 songs per playlist.

I’ve been noodling on stealing this idea ever since Kurt posted it.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-06T13:20:04.000Z

Wow. Interesting fact of that day: Louisiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland: The only 5 US States that have ever had an African-
American Governor

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-06T00:26:06.000Z

This years family yearbook is another amazing time capsule. Tammy makes one each year and they are an instant family keepsake! So good.

Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling... - Barry Hess

2026-04-05T02:48:31.000Z

Short, and late, rendition of Friday this week as I’m traveling.

We took a spring break to Phoenix and were able to fit in a Project Hail Mary IMAX screening. It was excellent! Two of us have read the book, and we enjoyed both versions of the story on their own terms.

We got in to Phoenix late on a Friday, stayed at a hotel, and kicked around the city proper on Saturday before checking into our VRBO. Out of nowhere I found an afternoon performance of Come From Away at The Phoenix Theatre. It was our first time seeing the musical, and it was fantastic. Lots of memories flooded back for those of us who lived through 9/11.

Other than the two events above, this trip was pure relaxation for us. A few meals out, a lot of ice cream, and otherwise lounging around the pool at the VRBO. We all are coming home with some new tans (and a few burns).

We wrapped the last meal of our trip at Fabio on Fire in Peoria. Excellent pizza, excellent pasta.

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“Seat”-pocalypse not SaaSpocalypse - Garrick van Buren

2026-04-04T01:11:28.000Z

The SaaSpocalypse wasn’t caused by AI, but will be perpetuated by it.

AI (OpenAI, Anthrophic, Gemini, etc) evaporating $300B in market value is vivid, compelling, serves everyone involved, and like so much hype – mostly completely wrong.

The narrative is: AI arrived. Revenue stalled. Therefore customers are buying fewer seats because they’re implementing AI.

Businesses across industries stopped growing headcount three years ago. Here’s the seasonally adjusted, non-farm job openings & hires against interest rates since 2000.

Data compiled from https://fred.stlouisfed.org/

Narrative fallacy (Taleb): the mind’s compulsion to construct causal stories from loosely related events. Strongest under uncertainty, when a vivid explanation is available and the actual cause is diffuse and banal.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc: e.g. “after this, therefore because of this.” It is the fallacy underlying most financial news narratives (“stocks rose on news that…”), most earnings call explanations, and apparently most SaaSpocalypse postmortems.

The non-farm hire rate peaked in early 2022 at the top of the post-COVID snap-back. Then fell steadily, continuously, for three years. In February 2026 it sat at 3.1, nearing the lows of the 2008 financial crisis. This decline was well underway before Claude Code existed (Feb 2025) and before Klarna made headlines ditching Salesforce (Sep 2024).

A recent Fast Company posited SaaSpocalypse a myth, arguing enterprise software encodes institutional architecture too deeply to be replaced by general-purpose agents.

Maybe. The question is not whether AI can replace Salesforce with a homegrown solution because it’s too operationally ensconced. The question is whether the companies running Salesforce are growing their human sales force and purchasing more seat licenses. The JOLTS data suggests they’re not – and haven’t since 2022.

Seat-based SaaS revenue is a function of customer headcount. When your customers stop hiring, they also stop buying the follow-on tools and amenities supporting the new employees.

Unfortunately, seats are in the revenue forecast, in the sales quotas, in the board expectations, in the investor guidance. The entire operating system of a enterprise SaaS business is calibrated to a number the company does not control and never did: its customers’ hiring plans.

When hiring grew reliably through the 2010s, this was invisible. Seat expansion looked like product success. NRR above 120% felt like a moat. It was, in part, just a rising labor market expressing itself through software licenses.

Headcount go up?

Many SaaS compaanies are now pivoting to outcome-based or consumption-based pricing (this was all my 2025 client work). Both realign pricing with customer’s economics rather than their headcount. ARR still matters. A dollar of ARR anchored to customer economics is more durable than a dollar of ARR anchored to a seat count in a contracting labor market.

This is not a new.

Probably have been this way all along.

The signal is now visible in the capital markets too. Last quarter, Blue Owl investors requested return of $5.4 billion across two private credit funds, redemption rates of 40.7% and 21.9% respectively. KKR, Apollo, BlackRock followed by invoking their 5%/quarter withdrawal gates. Blue Owl attributed the pressure to “heightened market concerns around AI-related disruption to software companies.”

The headcount shrinkage has already happened.

Tech layoffs tracked by layoffs.fyi peaked at 264,000 in 2023, then decelerated: 153,000 in 2024, 124,000 in 2025, 41,000 so far in 2026. The acute phase is largely over. As you can see from the graph above, hiring has not rebounded across sectors. What remains is structurally lower hiring floor, because the companies doing the laying off stopped backfilling. Low-fire, low-hire, and no new seat licenses..

My bet is not that “AI will disrupt SaaS”. My bet, is “companies will get smaller”.

Fewer employees than yesterday.

Quarter after quarter.

Suggesting the Saaspocalypse isn’t today, or in 2026, it’s forward-looking. Not because the SaaS companies have poor fundamentals or shrinking margins, but because their customers, and the US economy overall, stopped growing jobs.

Yes, some part we can blame on the productivity enhancements of AI. Hell, I’m planning to leverage AI in my business as much as I can ahead of hiring a person. But, $300B in market value? No. AI is not that good yet.

The post “Seat”-pocalypse not SaaSpocalypse appeared first on Garrick van Buren.

Post on Jamie Thingelstad - Jamie Thingelstad

2026-04-03T20:33:45.000Z

I’ve tried to get used to “Click wallpaper to show desktop” for long enough now and I still despise it. Also “Show menu bar background” is a must. Annoys me that I now have to go set esoteric settings to make macOS work the way I want it to.

Post on Patrick Rhone - Patrick Rhone

2026-04-03T11:53:28.000Z

I too am proud to be called “Old School“.