The Extinction of Enterprise Architects, Fifty Secrets Managers, and Deodorant Before AI, with Rick Clark
Episode 129 · October 22nd, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
About this Episode
Rick Clark is Global Head of Cloud Advisory at UST, and co-founded OpenStack. His argument is that enterprise architecture is nearly extinct, killed off by fifteen years of shifting every decision left, and that this is how one insurance company he worked with ended up running over 50 secrets managers in production. Whitney and Coté push on whether platform engineering was meant to solve exactly that, and on what a modern enterprise architect would do instead - write the rules the platform enforces. The back half is agents: why nobody is ready to run them in production, and the difference between a rule an agent cannot break and one it must not break.
You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.
Mentions:
- Rick on LinkedIn, which is where he sends people.
- The Construct, his newsletter on agentic workloads in production.
- From tokenmaxxing to tokenomics: you're still doing it wrong, his first op-ed for The Stack.
Special Guest: Rick Clark.