The Hangover 4.0 (Avoided): AWS re:Invent, The "Year of the Agent," Mixed Model Arts, and the Ensh*tification of Everything

First off, Hangover 4.0 successfully avoided. I didn’t go to AWS re:Invent this year. Despite having a ticket, a hotel, and a flight booked, I decided my nervous system was fried from my tour and decided to hang out with my kids instead. But that didn’t stop Matt Housley and me from catching up on our regular Friday podcast to digest the news from afar. If you’ve been following various vendor feeds, you know the narrative: 2025 is the “Year of the Agent”. But looking past the keynote announcements and polished demos, the reality of the data landscape is different. Agents are getting more capable, but they’re not ready for prime time. From the hardware wars brewing between Google and NVIDIA to the “enshitification” of our favorite platforms, here is our breakdown of where the industry actually stands right now.

• AI Agents aren’t ready for prime time. Despite the marketing blitz at re:Invent and other vendor conferences, fully autonomous LLM agents are still largely a dream. The most effective “agents” right now are just good old-fashioned deterministic software augmented with ML.

• The Hardware Cold War is heating up. Google positioned itself as a direct competitor to NVIDIA with advancements and availability of TPUs. This will be fascinating to watch unfold, especially given each company’s influence on the S&P index.

• “Enshitification” is real. From search results eating their own AI-generated tail to LinkedIn suppressing outbound links, the user experience on the internet is degrading in favor of platform lock-in. LinkedIn sucks, but we still use it…for now.

• The “O word”, ontologies, are suddenly cool. Seems like everyone including my Goldendoodle is an ontology expert. But this isn’t without good reason. As AI models struggle with reasoning, the industry is swinging back toward ontologies, graphs, and semantics to provide necessary context.

• A detour into my upcoming book, “Mixed Model Arts.” It’s time to end the religious wars of data modeling. We need a pragmatic, style-agnostic approach to modeling data, where we use whatever works for the fight at hand, across all forms of data and use cases.

On another note, I quipped on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7402580706780225536/) the other day that data modeling is coming back from the dead. Some people asked what I meant by data modeling being “dead.” Stay tuned for a longer article about my thoughts on why the practice of data modeling withered in the last several years, and why it’s coming back. Also, dropping a new chapter in the book (business processes and domains), and much more. Have a great weekend, Joe Thanks for reading! Subscribe to receive new content, usually every week. Awesome Upcoming EventsI’ll be in Denver next Tuesday and making a cameo appearance at Seattle Data Guy’s low key data happy hour. To keep it mysterious, search around for details. If you’re around, see you there. Working on my 2026 event schedule, and so far it looks dope. But since I just finished an exhausting Fall tour, I don’t want to think about it too much right now. Stay tuned… My upcoming events are also posted here (https://joereis.notion.site/?v=2650bd0106038107b707000c744a165b&pvs=73). But wait, there’s more!• • Cool Reads and VideosMy friends Mark Freeman and Chad Sanderson joined me to chat about data contracts, and writing a book while scaling their startup Gable. Here are some things I read this week that you might enjoy.DIFFERENT KINDS OF DATA MODELS - by William Inmon (https://williaminmon.substack.com/p/different-kinds-of-data-models) Can LLMs give us AGI if they are bad at arithmetic? – Wes McKinney (https://wesmckinney.com/blog/llms-arithmetic/) What makes something data?. This is a question I posted on BlueSky… | by Emily M. Bender | Nov, 2025 | Medium (https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/what-makes-something-data-f6d9f498f312) BigQuery Explained: What Really Happens When You Hit “Run” (https://luminousmen.substack.com/p/bigquery-explained-what-really-happens?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1936637&post_id=178201034&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=23opd&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email) Process Knowledge Management - Jessica Talisman (https://jessicatalisman.substack.com/p/process-knowledge-management) Werner Vogels Hands Out Newspapers at His Final Re:Invent Keynote. The Man Who Built the Cloud Isn’t Done Teaching. (https://www.implicator.ai/werner-vogels-hands-out-newspapers-at-his-likely-final-re-invent-the-man-who-built-the-cloud-isnt-done-teaching/) ChatGPT’s user growth has slowed, report finds | TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/05/chatgpts-user-growth-has-slowed-report-finds/) When Did Modeling Die? - Chris Gambill (https://substack.com/home/post/p-180839990) The Top Data Trends for 2026 - Coalesce.io (https://coalesce.io/reports/the-top-data-trends-for-2026) Find My Other Content Here📺 YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@joereisdata) - Interviews, tutorials, product reviews, rants, and more. 🎙️ Podcasts (https://open.spotify.com/show/3mcKitYGS4VMG2eHd2PfDN?si=7bd8ffc4d5b840ce) - Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts 📝 Practical Data Modeling (https://practicaldatamodeling.substack.com/) - This is where I’m writing my upcoming book, Mixed Model Arts, mostly in public. Free and paid content. The Practical Data CommunityThe Practical Data Community is a place for candid, vendor-free conversations about all things tech, data, and AI. We host regular events such as book clubs, lunch-and-learns, Data Therapy, and more. 🤖 Join on Discord (https://discord.gg/gNfw5AKWSK)

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.