The mid-year scorecard

Half a year of dispatches deserves the same audit this wire applies to everyone else. The tally, kept straight.

Upheld: the outage taxonomy has needed no revision, config remains the season's leading killer, and the Ingress NGINX countdown aged exactly as written, with migration stories now arriving on the predicted calendar. Upheld with interest: the claim that review capacity, not generation, is the AI bottleneck keeps being confirmed by every team we talk to.

Pending: whether the hyperscaler passthrough arrives as list-price increases or stays disguised in tiers and terms. Autumn will grade that one.

Wrong, instructively: dispatch zero promised quiet weeks when news was thin. There have been no thin weeks. The error was not optimism about the industry's calm; it was underestimating how much of the noise, read slowly, turns out to be signal wearing a bad headline.

The builder's read: audit your own predictions on a calendar, in public if you can afford it. The habit is cheap, the credibility is not, and the wrong ones teach more than the upheld.