Send a text

🎙 AI: Commodity or Differentiator? | The Value Flywheel in 2026

AI has taken a step change. Over the past few months, adoption has accelerated dramatically — but are organisations applying it with clarity, or just chasing hype?

In this episode of The Serverless Edge, we unpack:

AI as a commodity vs differentiator
Why clarity of purpose matters more than ever
The risks of “vibe coding” critical systems
Security, blast radius, and agent containment
Accelerating your Value Flywheel safely with AI
Why you cannot outsource critical thinking to an LLM

If you're a CTO, architect, or engineering leader trying to navigate AI adoption without introducing systemic risk — this conversation is for you.

⏱ Chapter Markers

00:00 – The AI Step Change: What Happened in Late 2025?
02:00 – AI as Commodity vs Differentiator
03:10 – The Cost of Building What’s Already a Commodity
04:20 – Internal Acceleration vs Product Features
05:30 – Training Data, Sovereignty & Enterprise Risk
06:45 – Where AI Becomes Dangerous in Your Organisation
08:00 – Agentic AI & Blast Radius: Why Containment Matters
09:20 – Competing With the Platform Providers
11:10 – SaaS Killed by AI? The AWS Reinvent Effect
13:00 – “Vibe Coding” Core Business Systems (And Why That’s Madness)
15:00 – Where You Shouldn’t Experiment With AI
16:00 – Faster Feedback Loops & Engineering Throughput
17:30 – Discipline, Metrics & the North Star
18:20 – Using AI to Improve Your Own Thinking
19:00 – Context Is Everything (And Harder Than You Think)
20:10 – Organisational Design for Humans and Agents
21:00 – Turning the Flywheel Before Adding AI
21:50 – Why Sitting on the Sidelines Isn’t an Option

🔎 Key Themes
1. Clarity Before Capability

Most organisations should consume AI, not build foundational models. The differentiator is rarely the LLM itself — it’s how clearly you understand:

Your user needs
Your value chain
Your supply chain dependencies
Your regulatory boundaries
Without that clarity, AI simply accelerates confusion.

2. Blast Radius & Containment

Agentic systems introduce a new risk profile.
If you deploy AI into:
Poorly governed SDLC environments
Weakly defined security domains
Legacy operational processes
You expand blast radius unintentionally.
Think SaaS isolation. Think sandboxing. Think containment by design.

3. Speed Changes Everything

If AI compresses delivery cycles from weeks to hours:
Your product discovery loop must accelerate
Decision-making must tighten
Metrics must be explicit
Engineering must sit inside the feedback loop
AI increases velocity — but velocity without direction is chaos.

4. You Cannot Outsource Critical Thinking

AI can help:
Refine your North Star
Improve impact mapping
Sharpen KPIs
Draft Wardley Maps
Analyse value chains
But it cannot replace:
Context
Judgement
Organisational alignment
Strategic trade-offs

You still need to do the hard yards.

📚 Related Concepts & Resources

The Value Flywheel Effect
Wardley Mapping
North Star Framework
Impact Mapping
SDLC Acceleration
Agentic AI Architecture

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

AI Myths in Software Engineering. AI is colliding with software engineering at full speed — and a lot of myths are emerging along the way.

In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly unpack how AI, GenAI, and agentic systems intersect with the ideas behind The Value Flywheel Effect. Rather than hype or fear, this is a grounded engineering discussion about quality, responsibility and long-term value.

We explore six common myths about AI and software engineering — and why good engineering judgement, domain knowledge, and clarity of purpose matter more than ever.

If you care about building sustainable systems, not just shipping demos, this one’s for you.

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome & context
Why AI + serverless + the Value Flywheel is colliding right now

01:50 – Myth 1: “Software engineering is dead”
Why engineering skills are more valuable, not less

07:06 – Myth 2: “My skills will become irrelevant”
Moving up the value chain, domain expertise, and growth mindset

13:40 – Myth 3: “The quality isn’t good enough”
Standards, constraints, and why worst it’ll ever be is today

18:44 – Myth 4: “The model understands the problem”
Pattern matching vs understanding, context, and critical thinking

24:20 – Myth 5: “I’ll be forced to use AI”
Workflows, guardrails, security, and excessive privileges

31:54 – Myth 6: “We’ll need fewer engineers”
Jevons Paradox, lowered barriers, and the coming demand explosion

34:22 – Closing thoughts
AI, velocity, and the future of sustainable software engineering

Key Themes Discussed

AI as an abstraction layer, not a replacement for engineering
Why standards, constraints, and operability still matter
Domain-Driven Design as AI-amplifying, not obsolete
Agentic systems, skills, prompts, and containment
Security risks: excessive privileges & supply-chain concerns
Velocity vs sustainability in AI-assisted development

Resources & References

The Value Flywheel Effect – principles referenced throughout
Wardley Mapping & situational awareness
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
OWASP Top 10 for LLMs (excessive privileges, agent risks)
Jevons Paradox (efficiency driving increased demand)
Early cloud cost & governance parallels
Threat modelling for AI and agentic systems

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

In the first Serverless Craic episode of 2026, Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly reflect on a five-year journey that began in early 2021 with the idea for The Value Flywheel Effect.

This episode closes out the book series by looking back—warts and all—at what it really took to write, publish, promote, and apply the ideas in practice. The conversation spans writing fatigue, editing realities, imposter syndrome, enterprise adoption, and why the flywheel is arguably more relevant than ever in an AI-first world.

If you care about modern software delivery, cloud strategy, serverless-first thinking, and leading technology change, this one is for you.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Welcome & context
Episode 79, first show of 2026, and closing out the book series

01:20 – How the book started (2021 → 2026)
From an idea to a five-year journey

01:35 – Did we enjoy writing the book?
Ideation, Guinness-fuelled drafts, and the reality of writing

02:30 – Shaping the narrative
Why writing is harder than it looks, and why shared context doesn’t scale

04:10 – Atomic essays & capturing thinking early
GitHub, short-form writing, and building habits

05:00 – Would this book have helped us 15 years ago?
Modernisation gaps, agile limits, and why the flywheel mattered

06:00 – The editing process (and thick skin)
What professional editors really do to your manuscript

07:40 – Feedback, criticism, and author psychology
Why the one negative comment sticks

09:15 – Has the book made an impact?
Enterprises, conferences, and unexpected adoption stories

12:40 – Applying the flywheel in real organisations
North Stars, Team Topologies, serverless-first in practice

14:30 – The hardest part of the whole journey
Finishing, introductions, and the truth about selling a book

17:30 – Promotion, modesty, and imposter syndrome
Why marketing a book is a full-time job

19:00 – Influences & supporters
Kent Beck, Adrian Cockcroft, Simon Wardley, and standing on shoulders

21:45 – Is the book still relevant in the age of GenAI?
Why the flywheel + AI is a force multiplier

23:00 – AI, context engineering, and agentic systems
Using codified principles to guide AI effectively

25:30 – Lowering the barrier to good practice
How AI helps teams apply architecture, security, and governance

29:00 – Business strategy vs technical strategy
Is the divide finally disappearing?

31:45 – The emerging “builder” persona
Shifting left, shifting right, and new SDLC realities

34:50 – Closing thoughts & what’s next
AISDLCs, Brownfield challenges, and future episodes

📚 Resources & Links

📘 The Value Flywheel Effect — principles for modern cloud and serverless transformation

🌐 The Serverless Edge: https://theserverlessedge.com

🎥 Subscribe on YouTube for weekly Serverless Crack episodes

💬 Follow the conversation on LinkedIn

💡 Key Takeaways

Writing a book is much harder than most engineers expect

The flywheel was never about tech or business—it’s about both

AI makes codified principles (North Stars, well-architected practices) more valuable, not less

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

How the BBC Built a Serverless-First Architecture: In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael explore one of the most compelling real-world examples of serverless at scale: the BBC’s serverless-first transformation.

We break down how the BBC News engineering team delivers global, highly-spiky traffic, meets strict public-service constraints, reduces incidents, and accelerates delivery—all with a pragmatic serverless-first mindset.

Expect insights on production readiness, architectural constraints, continuous delivery, problem prevention at scale, and how the BBC evolved a massive digital estate by keeping things intentionally simple.

⏱️ Chapter Markers

00:00 – Intro
00:03 – Welcome to the episode
00:21 – BBC case study overview
02:11 – Complexity, scale and global distribution
03:42 – User experience, design systems, and history of BBC transformation
05:03 – Serverless-first and focusing on differentiating value
05:47 – Spiky traffic, transcoding and pragmatic trade-offs
06:42 – Constraints and why serverless works for the BBC
07:59 – Team size, reducing maintenance load, and continuous delivery
08:27 – Serverless-first, not serverless-only
09:05 – BBC traffic levels and operational performance
09:47 – Problem prevention, reliability and long-term value
10:02 – Improvements in BBC Media Player and user experience
10:06 – Evolution, complexity, and Gold’s Law
11:01 – Closing thoughts and what’s coming next
11:08 – Outro & Call to action

🔧 Resources & Mentions

BBC Article – Delivering BBC Online Using Serverless https://www.bbc.co.uk/articles/clynq1gyn1ro

The Serverless Edge – The Value Flywheel Effect Framework
https://theserverlessedge.com/12-key-tenets-of-the-value-flywheel-effect/

Gall's Law – Complex systems evolving from simple systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)

Adrian Cockcroft – Serverless constraints and production readiness
https://medium.com/@adrianco

AWS Serverless Best Practices
https://builder.aws.com/content/2pYmkuLReVaqZ29ew1P3Dn4iAvH/best-practices-for-serverless-technologies-in-aws

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

In this episode of The Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael dive into Chapter 19: Mapping the Emerging Value from The Value Flywheel Effect. This chapter explores how leaders can use Wardley Mapping to uncover long-term strategic opportunities, align product thinking, and identify “land grab” moments that unlock future business value.

The conversation covers:

How mindset, purpose, and cloud strategy form organisational pipelines

The three major value chains: sustainable operations, long-term goals, and land-grab opportunities

How emerging capabilities, product thinking, and situational awareness combine to create competitive advantage

Practical leadership behaviours and gameplay patterns from Wardley Mapping

Examples from AI, cloud evolution, open source, and platform teams

Why high-performing engineering organisations create the conditions for long-term innovation

This is a deep dive for technology leaders who want to create adaptive, strategically aligned organisations capable of sensing and seizing new market opportunities.

📍 Chapters

00:00 – Intro
00:12 – Setting the context: Chapter 19
01:00 – Why long-term value isn’t just architecture
01:50 – The future CEO as an anchor for the map
02:25 – The three organisational pipelines
03:30 – Sustainable operations value chain
04:40 – Long-term goals and product mindset
06:33 – Psychological safety, experimentation & ambition
07:30 – Run → Grow → Transform
09:05 – Ineffective innovation & product debt
11:32 – The “land grab” and adjacent market opportunities
12:51 – Cloud, customer obsession & competitive advantage
13:57 – Revisiting the map
15:13 – Wardley Mapping gameplay patterns
16:20 – FUD and competitive games
18:01 – Open source as an accelerator
18:33 – Market enablement in the AI era
19:07 – Toxicity, constraints & real-world leadership
20:14 – Sensing engines, co-creation & alliances
21:03 – Competitive moves: talent raids & fast-followers
22:11 – Wrapping up & next steps

🔗 Resources & Links

📘 The Value Flywheel Effect Book
https://itrevolution.com/the-value-flywheel-effect/

🌍 Learn Wardley Mapping
https://learnwardleymapping.com/

🎙️ The Serverless Craic Podcast & Blog
https://theserverlessedge.com/

📚 Escape Velocity – Geoffrey Moore
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11103017-escape-velocity

🧭 Wardley Mapping Community Resources
https://wardleypedia.org/

👥 About The Serverless Craic

We explore modern cloud, serverless-first engineering, Wardley Mapping, the Value Flywheel, and high-performance technology leadership — with practical insights you can apply in your organisation today.

If you want resilient systems, rapid delivery, strong engineering culture, and adaptive strategy, you’re in the right place.

👍 Like, Subscribe & Join the Craic

If you enjoy these episodes, hit like, subscribe, and drop us a comment.
Let us know what topics you'd like us to dive into next.

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

Sustainability & Innovation in Modern Cloud: In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave, Mark, and Michael dive into Chapter 18 of The Value Flywheel Effect — Sustainability and Space for Innovation.
We explore why sustainable architectures, well-designed domains, situational awareness, and the innovate–leverage–commoditise cycle are essential for modern cloud leaders navigating long-term value.

From Wardley Mapping to domain-driven design, serverless sustainability to AI-driven development shifts, this chapter brings together multiple strands of modern engineering strategy.
If you’re leading engineering teams, shaping cloud strategy, or building adaptive systems, this one’s packed with value.

📌 Chapters

00:00 – Intro: dark evenings & winter vibes
00:30 – Chapter 18 overview: Sustainability & Space for Innovation
01:46 – Short-term thinking vs long-term clarity of purpose
02:18 – Misusing “lean”: why not everything is a Toyota Production System candidate
03:04 – Innovate → Leverage → Commoditise cycle: using the right mode at the right time
04:48 – The “difficult second album”: letting go as contexts evolve
05:26 – Anti-patterns: commoditising too early and sunk-cost fallacies
06:43 – Domain-driven design & business domain discovery
07:56 – Understanding your customer & real problem spaces
08:38 – Observability, metrics & sensing your organisation
09:24 – Why blind operation kills innovation
10:25 – Resilience as the ability to respond to threat & opportunity
11:30 – Stability & security before layering in AI
12:02 – Adaptation: AI disrupting SDLCs
13:38 – Architecting for extensibility & flow
14:27 – Evolving systems & leveraging cloud innovations
15:05 – True agility vs theatre
15:57 – Situational awareness & proactive leadership
17:31 – Frictionless developer experience & cognitive load reduction
18:41 – Cognitive load, boundaries, and mission clarity
20:26 – Sustainability: carbon, cost, and efficient architectures
21:04 – Wasteful compute & why sustainable design matters
21:29 – Green software & the Well-Architected Framework
22:08 – Takeaways: well-architected → sustainable → resilient → innovative
22:41 – Wrap-up & subscribe

🔗 Resources Mentioned
📘 Books & Frameworks

The Value Flywheel Effect – Anderson, McCann & O’Reilly
Team Topologies (2nd Edition) – Skelton & Pais
Frictionless – Dr Nicole Forsgren
Accelerate – Forsgren, Humble & Kim
Wardley Mapping – Simon Wardley

🛠 AWS & Cloud
AWS Well-Architected Framework (incl. Sustainability Pillar)
AWS Carbon Footprint Tool
Serverless First principles & guidance (The Serverless Edge)

🧭 Techniques & Concepts
Innovate → Leverage → Commoditise (ILC) Cycle
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Observability & Metrics
Cognitive Load, Flow State, Developer Experience
Situational Awareness & Value Chains
Garden vs Factory analogy

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

How to Build a Problem Prevention Culture (AWS Well-Architected Explained)
Stop firefighting — start preventing problems.
In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly explore how engineering teams can create a problem prevention culture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

They unpack lessons from Chapter 17 of The Value Flywheel Effect, showing how high-performing cloud teams use SCORP reviews (Security, Cost, Operational Resilience, Performance) to operationalise engineering excellence.
Learn how to:
✅ Shift from reactive to proactive problem solving
✅ Build dashboards that actually drive team learning
✅ Scale architecture reviews across hundreds of teams
✅ Foster psychological safety and positive peer pressure
✅ Future-proof your organisation for the AI-driven cloud era

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Intro and setup
00:40 – What is a problem prevention culture?
02:20 – Recognising unseen engineering work
04:30 – Balancing delivery and engineering excellence
05:40 – Defining “good architecture”
07:00 – The AWS Well-Architected Framework
08:40 – From theory to practice: SCORP sessions
10:30 – Scaling Well-Architected reviews
13:50 – Using dashboards for insight and improvement
15:00 – Building trust and psychological safety
17:00 – Peer learning and positive pressure
19:00 – Continuous improvement in real teams
21:00 – Measuring long-term maturity
22:30 – Looking forward to AI-driven cloud operations
25:00 – Outro and what’s next

🔗 Resources

📘 The Value Flywheel Effect → https://theserverlessedge.com/the-value-flywheel-effect

🧭 AWS Well-Architected Framework → https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected

🧩 SCORP Process & Templates → https://theserverlessedge.com/scorp-process-cycle

🎙️ Serverless Craic Podcast → https://theserverlessedge.com/podcast

💡 Follow The Serverless Edge on LinkedIn and YouTube

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube

Send us a text

In this episode of Serverless Craic, Dave Anderson, Mark McCann, and Michael O’Reilly share key takeaways from two major events — AWS Community Summit Manchester 2025 and AWS Cloud Day Dublin 2025.

From psychological safety in engineering teams to serverless adoption patterns, event-driven architecture, and the rise of AI agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, the discussion highlights what’s shaping cloud-native development today.

If you’re a software engineer, cloud architect, or tech leader interested in modernisation, AI in the enterprise, serverless-first strategies, and community-led learning, this episode is for you.

⏱ Chapters
00:00 – Intro & catching up
00:55 – AWS Community Summit Manchester highlights
02:10 – Psychological safety in engineering teams
05:30 – AI hype, misuses & team impact
07:10 – Women in Tech track & allyship
08:30 – Event-driven architecture & domain-driven design
10:45 – Modernisation talks & API boundaries
12:00 – The reality of AI adoption in enterprises
14:55 – Serverless adoption patterns & challenges
15:53 – AWS Cloud Day Dublin highlights
17:45 – AI agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
19:14 – Challenges of agentic user experiences
20:15 – Securing and testing AI systems (OWASP LLM Top 10)
21:00 – Well-Architected Framework (SCORP) talk
21:39 – Power of community learning
22:22 – Wrap up & next episode preview

🔗 Resources & Mentions

The Serverless Edge Website: https://theserverlessedge.com

Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-serverless-edge/

The Serverless Edge GitHub – SCORP: https://github.com/ServerlessEdge/SCORP

Amazon Bedrock & AgentCore: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/

Event Catalogue: https://eventcatalog.dev/

Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
Check out our book The Value Flywheel Effect
Follow us on X @ServerlessEdge
Follow us on LinkedIn
Subscribe on YouTube