Enterprise-Architecture

The AI hype cycle is running on fumes — and the fumes are labeled “Future,” “Promise,” and “More AI!” We’ve all seen it. A wobbly tower of buzzwords. Robots with megaphones. Executives cheering at a pile of rubble with “REALITY” written at the base. The cartoon writes itself because the pattern writes itself: Announce the AI initiative Stack acronyms until the tower looks impressive Call any collapse a “learning opportunity” Add more AI What’s actually out of hand isn’t AI. It’s the organizational incompetence that AI is being asked to hide. ...

There’s a word MIT hackers coined in the 1950s: cruft — useless, tangled, accumulated junk that makes a system incomprehensible and impossible to build on. Sound familiar? In 2026, we have a new variant: crufty AI. Chatbots bolted onto data silos. LLMs fed dirty, unstructured, undocumented inputs. Automation layered on top of processes nobody fully understands anymore. Pilots that never graduate. Dashboards nobody uses. Vendors paid. ROI: zero. This isn’t an AI problem. It’s a cruft problem. ...