Blog

Notes on Software, Data, and AI

Plainspoken writing on custom software, agentic AI, data, cloud, and keeping it all POPIA-aligned. New stories every week.

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AIAgentic AIPOPIA

What 'Agentic' Actually Means (And Why Most Things Called Agentic Are Just Chatbots)

Most software sold as agentic is a chatbot with a new label. Here is one clean test to tell the difference, plus the benchmark numbers vendors hope you have not read.

4 June 2026 · 6 min read

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CloudPOPIAAI

Should Your Data Live in Cape Town? The Real Tradeoffs of AWS af-south-1

Hosting in Cape Town helps with POPIA and latency, but location alone is not compliance. The real trap sits in the AI layer, where your data can quietly leave the country the moment your software calls a frontier model.

28 May 2026 · 7 min read

Abstract dark database schema network with a single orange retrieval path

AIDataSoftware

Text-to-SQL Done Properly Is a Retrieval Problem, Not a Prompt

The real danger in plain-English data tools is not SQL that errors out. It is SQL that runs, returns a confident number, and is quietly wrong. That is a retrieval and governance problem, not a prompting one.

21 May 2026 · 7 min read