Daily Reading List – December 8, 2025 (#680)

Today’s reading list has a good mix of news, analysis, and advice. I never know what I’ll end up with when I start the day, but I like when a potpourri emerges.

[article] Scaling Cloud and Distributed Applications: Lessons and Strategies. This article looks at how you design for scale with a focus on reliability, automation, and isolation.

[article] Gemini 3 Pro scores 69% trust in blinded testing up from 16% for Gemini 2.5: The case for evaluating AI on real-world trust, not academic benchmarks. I’m glad we’re not depending solely on academic benchmarks to evaluate AI models.

[blog] Stakeholders and the Product Model. Give teams problems to solve, not proposed solutions to build.

[blog] Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI. Just when you’re starting to treat the status quo of AI as boring, something new happens that upends our expectations. Video processing at 10 frames per second? Wild.

[report] State of AI. Monster report from OpenRouter that explores real-world use of LLMs, based on analysis of 100 trillion tokens interactions.

[article] Most Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders. Here’s What to Do About It. Solid advice here if you’re looking to rebuild trust within and across teams.

[blog] Building a Production-Ready AI Security Foundation. This looks at the app layer, data layer, and infrastructure layer and how you provide the smartest protection for each.

[article] Should CIOs let go of long-term planning cycles? You want a durable vision and stable focus areas, but I can’t imagine that anyone nowadays should be locked into long-term programs with no flexibility.

[blog] Streamline the design and deployment of application infrastructure with Application Design Center, now GA. I’m happy this is now GA and with new capabilities like the option to import your existing Terraform to create sharable templates. An integrated design –> deploy –> manage IDP experience is a good deal for devs.

[blog] IBM to Acquire Confluent. It seems like a few commercial open source companies have plateaued a bit, so maybe acquisitions will continue. Congrats to all involved!

[blog] You Don’t Buy an “AI Platform”—You Buy Layers Introducing the 4+1 AI Platform RFP Framework (Open Edition). Keith is sharing an open RFP template that you can use as a buyer to better evaluate vendors, and as a vendor, who wants to understand what buyers are looking for.

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