Jay Cuthrell WTF

What The Fudge for April 26, 2026: Waymos on the 101, Scaling the BIPC, and the SpaceX IPO Pivot

Reflections from the Bay Area, the shift to Agentic AI governance, the BIPC quip, and the SpaceX move toward an AI-centric IPO.

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🎙️ The “Lots of 26s” Edition

Welcome to What the Fudge for April 26, 2026. Lots of 26s today. I look at this week as one of those stories of what happens when you get to move around a little bit and see the progress of the world in motion.

📍 Field Report: Waymo and Amara’s Law

I found myself out in San Francisco and the Bay Area this week. Because of a tight schedule that wouldn’t work with BART or Caltrain, I ended up renting a car. That’s something I don’t often do as a primary Lyft user. So, I noticed something startling while driving the 101.

  • Autonomous Saturation: I saw “lots and lots of Waymo vehicles” on the 101, which was a shock as I assumed these autonomous driving systems were limited to city areas or non-highway environments.
  • The 10-Year Rule: It reminded me of Roy Amara’s law: we tend to overestimate what can happen in a few years and vastly underestimate what can happen in a decade or more.
  • Calibration: Since the “Uber Cab” days, the progress in autonomous driving has moved from a “cool” mobile summoning trick to a pervasive, barreling reality on major highways.

🤖 The Agentic Shift: From BICC to BIPC

This week, the conversation around Agentic AI shifted into high gear, mirroring what I heard recently at Qlik Connect. We are moving into a world where work is being delegated to non-human agents.

  • IDP Governance: There is a major focus on the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) side for non-human agents. These agents are becoming first-class users interacting directly with infrastructure, which raises massive questions about security and governance.
  • The BIPC Quip: In the old days, it would have been called a Business Intelligence Center of Confidence (BICC). Now, what we really have is a Business Intelligence Person of Confidence (BIPC). While the BIPC is great for that specific, confident individual, it is not a scalable operation. To reach a true center of competence, we need wider adoption and smarter rollout of these AI-enabled toolsets.
  • Agentic Empowerment: There is a growing sentiment that it is okay to let AI work on the projects you know you’ll never actually complete yourself, empowering developers to “turn it loose” and see what it does.

📈 Infrastructure, Layoffs, and the ZIRP Hangover

There is a growing critique in the news cycle about the relationship between AI investment and the current labor market.

  • The Cost of “Smart”: We have to ask if organizations are using the most expensive AI technology on the market for tasks that would be better suited for basic automation.
  • Layoffs and Infrastructure: The lens is shifting to whether layoffs are a result of over-hiring or the crushing cost of the hardware infrastructure required to deploy AI.
  • Post-ZIRP Reality: Aggressive hiring is very much in the rearview mirror as the industry applies a new cultural critique to business health.

🛰️ Sovereign AI & The Space Value Chain

The quest for Sovereign AI continues to go global, as countries look to protect their interests on a per-region basis.

  • Quantum Security: We are rapidly approaching the need for post-quantum encryption. Protecting data at rest today means preparing for a world where current cryptography is fundamentally challenged.
  • SpaceX IPO Pivot: As SpaceX prepares for an intensive IPO buildup, the focus is shifting toward AI and other moonshots, with the original goal of reaching Mars being de-emphasized.
  • Exploration Updates: Incredible new images are coming back from the Curiosity Rover on Mars, and systems for Artemis 3 are moving forward as we keep an eye on the cost of putting a kilogram into space.
  • Value Chain Update: It’s probably worthwhile for me to go back and update svc.fudge.org (the Space Value Chain) with a new pull request.

That’s the wrap for What the Fudge for April 26, 2026. Be safe, be well. Take care.

Interesting Coverage for the Week

View this page on GitHub.

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