An interesting thought experiment is that a service that can both be triggered by, and write to, the same persistent queue can call an LLM in each iteration and create a self-evolving agentic workflow. Much like a Scrapy spider can recursively find new things to crawl, an agent can recursively find new things to do.

SQL is a great language to express “choose something from a priority queue and do something with it” but if you try to think about predefining your entire computation DAG as a single query rather than many queries over time, you lose the loose asynchronous iteration that gives an agent the same grace you’d give to a real-life task assignment. And that grace is what makes agentic workflows powerful.

From the OP:

> a policy change was inserted into the regional Spanner tables that Service Control uses for policies. Given the global nature of quota management, this metadata was replicated globally within seconds

If there’s a root cause here, it’s that “given the global nature of quota management” wasn’t seen as a red flag that “quota policy changes must use the standard gradual rollout tooling.”

The baseline can’t be “the trend isn’t worsening;” the baseline should be that if global config rollouts are commonly the cause of problems, there should be increasingly elevated standards for when config systems can bypass best practices. Clearly that didn’t happen here.

> When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees

Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...

To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.

First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.

> There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future.

I absolutely love https://www.draftable.com/compare - it’s an incredibly intuitive presentation of diffs from arbitrary documents, with fuzzy matching even between file types. It’s great for everything from “what did my cofounder change in this version of the deck” to “how can I quickly scan to understand how these PDF documents have evolved from a much earlier version.” Be careful with data security if uploading sensitive documents, of course. But it’s as effective a general-purpose diffing tool as one can imagine.

The real leap past this would be contextual AI extracted takeaways during the review or editing process, which begs for a specialized IDE. Makes me excited to see that this space is evolving!