John Pratt

My latest Substack is now live: Slacker Index: Why vertical integration is key for rapid hardware development In part 2 of a series, I break down what Slacker Index is and why optimizing lead times is so critical for enabling rapid, agile hardware development. https://lnkd.in/gwZczwdf

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Botjam didn’t happen overnight. Before “Private by default. Intelligent by design.” There was hardware. I started building clusters 8 years ago. Started small. Bought used. Added nodes. Repaired. Scaled. Repeated. Now I can't even get them all in one monitoring camera frame. But in the frame on the one from this post you might spot a familiar setup on the left hand side; once all I had, now just a spec in a far bigger rig. Open source was essential. Linux. Python. Kubernetes. Databases. Monitoring stacks. Everything stitched together piece by piece. Without open source, this wouldn’t exist. But open source doesn’t make it free. It cost every spare penny. Every late night. Every upgrade instead of comfort. Eight years later, those early racks turned into GPU clusters running real AI workloads. And that foundation is what made Botjam possible. Infrastructure first. Control first. Privacy first. In a world dominated by Elon Musk’s X, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Trump-era MAGA politics shaping tech narratives, global conflicts like Palestine influencing digital discourse, and Big Tech deciding what gets amplified. The AI race isn’t just technical anymore. It’s political, economic and algorithmic. Interesting timing as well. Elon Musk’s X offices in France were recently raided amid criminal allegations that include algorithm manipulation. Makes you wonder how long before more platforms face that level of scrutiny. Some days LinkedIn feels like it’s edging closer to the same conversation. The sacrifice has been real. The payoff? We’re just getting started. #HowItStarted #ClusterCube #Botjam #AI #OpenAI #ElonMusk #X #StartupJourney #Infrastructure #BuildInPublic

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Recognizing the contributions of Joshua B Kethan for his work on the Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) Program Manual. This guide aims to enhance access to structured HUMS practices for organizations without a formal program framework, while promoting safer, more effective health monitoring across diverse fleets. For more details, check out the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/eDUMdyUY

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"We have 5,000 hours. The industry needs 100,000." That stopped me cold. A test engineering lead told me yesterday how their $5M satellite project is stuck waiting 8 months for radiation testing slots. The kicker? There are only three facilities in the entire US that can do single event effect testing for space-bound electronics. Together, they offer about 5,000 hours annually. One defense contractor alone needs 20,000 hours. NASA takes most slots. The math doesn't work. Here's what's broken: We're using 1960s infrastructure for 2025's space economy. Every new constellation, every CubeSat startup, every defense initiative—they all bottleneck through the same three aging cyclotrons. Teams are literally grinding plastic off chips just to fit testing windows. The radiation testing shortage isn't just inconvenient. It's strangling innovation. Projects slip quarters, not weeks. Launch windows evaporate. First-mover advantages disappear while you wait in line. Who else is feeling this squeeze? How are you managing radiation testing delays in your projects?

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A couple of weeks ago, Nick Horob proposed the idea of building a tool that would analyze the sentiment of the Market Talk forum of AgTalk (for non-ag folks, it's an old school forum that's a bastion of poorly documented knowledge). It just so happens that I've been scraping data from AgTalk for nearly a year now, so I already had the data. https://agtalkpulse.com/ My biggest surprise from building it was how neutral the average sentiments are! Here's a quick breakdown of how it works: 1) A crawler consistently checks the active pages of AgTalk's Market Talk forum, scraping and persisting the posts. 2) When a new post is persisted, the Anthropic structured data API is used to assess a sentiment score and extract crop mentions and category tags. 3) A simple NextJS dashboard exposes the data for exploration. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to share it! This was really just a small toy project so I could use my NAS a bit more! I'm happy to share the data with anyone who is interested.

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On September 29th Anthropic Killed a quarter of YC companies and almost no one is talking about it... They renamed Claude Code SDK to "Agent SDK" and gave everyone access to the same engine that powers Claude Code. Memory, context management, subagents, the whole system. What this actually means: you can now build Claude Code but for your specific workflow. Want to build: -Claude Code for legal (reviews contracts, flags compliance issues) -Claude Code for finance (analyzes reports, builds forecasts) -Claude Code for customer support (resolves tickets, searches knowledge bases) -Claude Code for research (reads documents, synthesizes findings) -Claude Code for marketing (maintains brand voice, creates content) -Claude Code for productivity (Preps meetings, provides insights, keeps you on taks) The infrastructure that makes Claude Code actually work is now a toolkit you can point at any domain. If you've been thinking "I wish Claude Code existed for [my industry] or [my business]" you can just build it now.

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Can It Scale — or Is It Just Scaling Fees? One lesson I keep relearning — even with experience — is that not everything that works is meant to scale. #Frameworks, #APIs, and “plug-and-play” tools can look solid early. You build on them, things run, demos work. On the surface, everything feels fine. Then you zoom out. You realize the economics don’t make sense. Wallet-based SaaS services are a good example. You can architect clean systems, ship features, onboard users — and only later notice the framework is making excessive API calls, draining funds, and quietly turning your product into a pass-through for usage fees. At that point, the tool isn’t helping you scale client services. It’s scaling its own wallet. That’s not always malicious — but it is a signal. (More on what to watch for on Wednesday.) #TheJustJames #AiFounder #SerialEntrepreneur #FounderPerspective #SystemsThinking #StartupInfrastructure #TechnicalFounders #ScaleWisely #OperatorLessons #LongTermStrategies

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Couldn’t be happier with how well this article by Barratt Dewey encapsulates what we are working toward at Integrate. I don’t think it’s possible to underestimate how much of the United States Government runs on program and project management. While the headlines are usually about flashy budget increases and massive new programs, the work still has to get managed, and that’s largely happening the same way it was 50 years ago. We aim to fix that.

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Really "fun" tool for anyone interested in using graph theory to map and visualize attack paths in AWS. If you've ever used #Bloodhound, you'll enjoy this novel tool made for AWS by Evan Perotti (one of Security Risk Advisors's resident geniuses). Check out his talk if you're in Switzerland Thursday, March 19. #informationsecurity #AWS

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