noze turns twenty-six today.
Quite a ride, and it has brought us to the dawn of a new world for coding and for a good deal more, with signs of exponential growth now impossible to miss. Themes we have worked on for decades: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and digital health. They are also the ones where the ground is moving fastest.
Software that decides on its own changes the questions worth asking. No longer how good the answer is, but who authorised the action, where the model that produced it runs, and what stays on the record when somebody asks. Four technical challenges from here on.
Who authorised the agent
Until recently what mattered was the quality of the answer. Now the software acts: it opens pull requests, touches production systems, calls services on someone’s behalf. The useful question is administrative before it is technical: who authorised that agent, with what scope, and how do you revoke it tonight without breaking everything else. If revocation is a switch shared by the whole company, the scope was too broad to begin with.
Platforms are starting to answer at the infrastructure level rather than in written policy: Buzz gives every agent a key of its own and records the delegation as a signed event, so authorisation can be revoked without touching the identity of the person who granted it.
Bring the model to the data
For thirty years architecture moved the data towards the compute. With AI the opposite pays: sensitive data stays where it is and the model moves inside the perimeter that holds it. A model running there can be inspected, measured and kept switched on even when a supplier changes its mind, and open weight models have reached a level that makes this choice genuinely practical, for reasons that go well beyond licence cost.
The limit case has already happened: during an incident, the guardrails of closed models blocked the people running the forensic analysis, because a filter cannot tell someone writing an exploit from someone on the receiving end of one. A capability you host stays available in the worst hour. The incident response plan should name which tool you use when the usual one refuses to answer.
Compliance as a design specification
The EU AI Act, NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act ask for three things: event logging, component inventory, decision traceability. Read as paperwork they are a cost. Read as a specification they are exactly what it takes to make a system work.
Without an inventory nobody can answer “are we exposed?” when a vulnerability lands. Without event logging an incident cannot be reconstructed. Without traceability there is no way to tell why the model proposed what it proposed, which is the difference between fixing it and rebuilding it. A compliant system, when compliance entered at design time, is a system that is easier to observe and to repair.
The dates are known. CRA reporting obligations start on 11 September 2026, the essential requirements with SBOM on 11 December 2027. Whoever puts these into the architecture pays once; whoever chases them pays every time.
The many meanings of open
“Open” is not one word. It is five distinct choices, each of which can be made on its own, and each of which removes one more point where somebody else decides on your behalf.
- Open source for the code: you can read it, fix it, fork it.
- Open standards for the interfaces. The agent ecosystem is standardising fast: Model Context Protocol for tools, Agent Client Protocol for attaching agents. They are the difference between an integration that survives a change of supplier and one that gets rewritten from scratch every time.
- Open weights for the models: weights can be downloaded and run wherever they are needed, which is what makes the previous point practical.
- Open data wherever data can be opened: datasets and benchmarks somebody else can re-run, without which a published number stays a claim.
- Open governance for who decides: a project with written rules and a foundation behind them does not change its licence the morning somebody’s business plan changes.
They cost little on day one and pay off by the third change of supplier.
A toast to the future
The twenty-seventh year starts today, with these four challenges on the table. These are interesting years to have ahead.
Thank you to everyone who has shared part of the ride, and welcome to those still to come.
To the future!