Sumir Nagar

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An AI-hosted conversation about the essay “The Graveyard of Sure Things.” The thinking is mine; the conversation is theirs. Read the full piece on sumirnagar.com.

The Question Nobody Funds

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“Should we?” — two words, and the most expensive question in technology, because almost nobody is paid to ask it. The final essay in The Cost of Better on the question we quietly retired.

There Is No Cloud

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The cloud sounds like weather and runs like a foundry. The hidden environmental cost of AI data centres — in power, water, and the towns that pay the bill.

The Graveyard of Sure Things

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I have spent forty years watching technologies arrive announced as the destination — the place the whole industry was finally heading — and then, one by one, be revealed as detours. PowerBuilder. Sybase. Ruby on Rails. NoSQL. Blockchain. None of them failed, exactly. They were simply mistaken for the end of the road. A field…

From Punch Cards to Claude Code

Jun 14, 2026

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In 1978, I learned to code by hand-feeding punch cards into a machine. Today I describe my work in plain English and watch software write itself. Across that arc, an industry convinced itself the bill for progress had disappeared. It hadn’t — it never does. It only moves. The first essay in a series on…

The Last Human in the Loop – The Most Reassuring Phrase in Modern Enterprise

Jun 10, 2026

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It is 3:47am on a Sunday at a large bank. An autonomous adversary has been probing the bank’s third-party integrations for the past six minutes. By the time the bank’s autonomous defensive system has noticed, mapped the behaviour, decided it was malicious, and revoked the credentials, the entire interaction is over. The whole thing has…

The Identities That Do Not Sleep – Why Most Users Aren’t Users

Jun 3, 2026

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The headcount of your bank, your insurer, your hospital is in the annual report. The headcount of identities in your enterprise is not. The first number is a few thousand. The second, if anyone bothered to count, is somewhere between fifty thousand and several million. The first set has HR records, performance reviews, termination procedures.…

Cyber, InfoSec, Ops Risk – Defending in the Wrong Tense

May 27, 2026

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Cyber, information security, and operational risk arrive at the board as separate items on different slides, discussed by different people in different vocabularies. They are the same problem wearing three name badges. And most defence in 2026 is, technically, a form of historical research — controls that notice things very thoroughly, in the past tense.

I Didn’t Upskill. I Eliminated The Team.

Mar 30, 2026

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I built something in three days that should have taken a team a month. I didn’t upskill. I didn’t transition into a new role. I simply removed the need for the team. This is what that felt like — and what it means for the conversation we’ve been avoiding.

Leaders & Followers — The Era of Artificial Intelligence

Feb 26, 2026

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