What The Fudge for March 29, 2026: All Things AI, Digital Employees, and Solar Bricks

Welcome back to What the Fudge for Sunday, March 29th, 2026, the I Have Allergies Edition. So if I sound a little funny, I'm a little stuffed up. Sorry about that. But let's get to it. This week I had a chance to go to All Things AI in Raleigh-Durham. It was amazing. Got to catch up with a lot of folks. Really great. Huge number of people went. Took some video of the 500+ person line that was literally going down the sidewalks and around the corner. For folks trying to get in on particularly the second day where it was actually pretty chilly that morning in Durham. But the big stories this week around AI dominance, security risks. So some of the key names that are in the news this week, ones like Anthropic, where the Pentagon drama imbroglio continues over whether it is or isn't going to be used or not in the ways that it will or will not be used. Then there was the leak, I believe. Maybe it was planned leak. Maybe it wasn't a planned leak for Claude Mithos, Mithos, however you want say that. And that could be because maybe it just needed to have something else in the news. You never know these days. I guess PR and the Streisand effect being what it is, PR, you can still weigh by the pound. Either way, there's certainly speed and activity, all things anthropic and clode-related. And if you look at the supply chain style view of the world, or the value chain supply side of the world, It is important to understand that other packages and malware and safety are still in the news. Safety and security did not just go away because certain announcements were made that may have caused cybersecurity stocks to go down slightly because there was concern that somehow AI would displace security. No, no, no. Be assured there are still ways for security to go very, very wrong, regardless of whether it's humans or machines. And so in this example, I think what's important to understand is that there will be the open clause, the Nemo clause, and the other variants that go core faster and faster towards agentic or agents that are doing things with goals or outcomes, and they are becoming more of a, hey, I'm going to set this, forget about it, and come back later and get the benefit. Or it might be something that eventually runs in perpetuity.. But I think what you'll also see is some pretty strong pushback on what environments are allowed to take advantage of these autonomous software agents or agentic AIs. The definition also has to be formally codified. So I think it's important to also separate what would be considered automation from a true agent. And related to that, it may be coming to a theater near you in your HR department, but this concept of digital employees. So thinking about that in terms of both the digital employees that are being used as well as general usage of even the tokens used by human team members, maybe not even agents, but those agents and how many tokens they consume and how many humans that use AI, whether it's a workflow and automation or a basic LLM, those tokens do have real cost. So if you're familiar with technology business management, the three pillars, meaning traditional IT, CAPEX, all things related to variable SAS, IaaS, and, uh, you know, things of that nature that would fit into this model of more or less the description being OPEX. And then the final element, of course, of the labor. And then, of course, we'll be interested about labor as that third leg is— will that actually have a bifurcation to potentially split that third leg in two, between real human labor and digital employee labor? Next up, I would say the biggest kind of story was just social media, for lack of a better word. I think the— some of the court cases that were decided, uh, that actually do bring in not just Meta, which I think is what gets the most news, but it also does bring in YouTube. And this is, uh, brought up in a couple of different places that I was reading, but if Google and Meta are in this, there's a very good chance that this could expand, might even change how product engineering of those stacks promote, are promoted in a feature flag way within the United States. So that'll be very interesting to see what happens on those platforms in response to those lawsuits. But if you then go further out, I think, and take it just away from purely terrestrial, you know, concerns and look to the skies, it is going to be interesting that there will be increased interest in not just robotics on Earth, but robotics outside of our gravitational pull. And when they do go into orbit, they will most likely be related to or launched on satellites. And I think that's also where you'll start to see more of the countries and their own space programs coming into, I think, more focus. So keep an eye on that. But I think what will also happen along that way is there will be some of the benefits that are taking place in solar research and how much efficiency and energy conversion you get with the latest generation of solar energy solutions that will, I think, really change not just the precipitous drop in the cost of solar, but also the expectations of the efficiencies as well as the cost drops associated with solar. And that'll make, I think, the, the, the, the way that you store, uh, the energy from solar that you couldn't use during the day even more important. And you'll even see some instances where there are cement technologies or ceramic-based technologies for storing the heat to be used later. So when I read about this story, it made me think of the olivine bricks from the, uh, the, the energy crisis eras of the '70s, uh, from when I was a material science major and heard stories about olivine bricks and what if you made bricks, uh, buildings out of olivine brick to to help them stay basically the same temperature all the same time of year around. But it's getting pretty long, so I'm gonna wrap up. That was my attempt for What the Fudge Digest for March 29th, 2026.