The Weekly Squeeze: I Can Build AI Agents. Can One Run This Fucking Circus?

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This week I became Microsoft certified in Azure AI-103: building and deploying AI apps and agents. I can now give a machine instructions, connect it to tools and send it off to do something useful. Naturally, I looked up from this achievement to find the financial markets having a breakdown, Microsoft struggling to deliver email and two European governments making a convincing case for replacement by a kettle.

I had imagined feeling ready for the future. Instead, I appear to have qualified just in time to help identify the fucking remains.

The leather jacket has left the building

Jensen Huang resigned from Nvidia this week. The company selling the infrastructure for everyone’s glorious AI future is now being run by interim CEO Colette Kress, who presumably received the keys, a calculator and a very strong drink.

We have already covered the scandal. What interests me now is the spectacular arrangement underneath it: an industry promising to automate human intelligence, with investors apparently depending on one specific human remaining available in a leather jacket.

Was there no backup? No redundancy? We make people prove they are not robots to buy socks, but the future of computing gets a key-person dependency you could spot from fucking space.

Nvidia finished Thursday down around four percent after a much steeper opening plunge. The broader US market losses were comparatively modest, and European shares had just been setting records before retreating on Friday. This was a brutal Nvidia selloff, not every stock exchange simultaneously falling into a sinkhole.

Which is almost funnier. One corner of the market is screaming that the future is dead while another quietly checks whether insurance companies are doing well. The apocalypse, apparently, has sector allocation.

Crypto: the escape from traditional finance has caught traditional finance’s panic

Bitcoin dropped below $69,000 during Friday’s Asian session. The Block reported roughly $1.47 billion in liquidations over the preceding 24 hours. Nvidia uncertainty joined interest-rate fears and forced selling in the general financial woodchipper.

Decentralised finance. Centralised panic.

Every time someone explains that crypto is freedom from the old system, I would like them to include the part where the new system also loses its shit because somebody in America might change an interest rate.

And leverage. Fucking leverage. Apparently watching your own money disappear is insufficiently immersive. You need borrowed money strapped to it, so the experience also comes with acceleration.

Somewhere a man with laser eyes in his profile picture is explaining that this is healthy. His chart has fourteen arrows, three triangles and the emotional stability of a shopping trolley with a broken wheel.

Microsoft certified me. Microsoft then demonstrated the practical limitations

Back to my little achievement. I can build agents now. Agents that retrieve information, use tools and complete tasks. Could I build one to get me a job? One to read a vacancy, establish what the company actually wants and stop a recruiter asking whether ten years of internal promotions means I cannot commit?

Could it negotiate a salary? Could it identify which “hybrid” job means two days in the office and which means you may occasionally open your laptop at home while recovering from surgery? Could it stop an ATS rejecting me for lacking the experience listed directly underneath my fucking name?

The certificate says I can deploy agents. The labour market would presumably prefer five years of experience deploying the agent I built yesterday.

Then came this week’s Microsoft 365 outage. Outlook and Exchange-dependent features across services including Copilot and Teams were disrupted. Core Teams meetings largely kept working.

Of course they did. Email can die. Calendars can vanish. Your AI assistant can stare into the electronic void. But God forbid the 9:30 alignment call should be spared. Somewhere, a person was still saying, “Let’s take this offline,” while offline was actively happening to them.

I have completed the training. The cloud is having a little lie-down. If anyone needs me, I’ll be deploying an agent to find the person who approved the resilience slide.

The Netherlands: have we tried coalition counselling?

In The Hague, Rob Jetten called crisis talks after D66 and CDA backed a tax compromise opposed by their VVD coalition partner. Wealth taxation helped turn the governing arrangement into a group project where somebody has just deleted the shared document.

The government was under threat as this edition was prepared. Apparently getting a tax plan through parliament can now endanger the government that needed a tax plan. A magnificent system. The washing machine finishes its cycle and the kitchen resigns.

The Netherlands can negotiate usable land out of the fucking sea. Three parties agreeing who pays what? Suddenly we need a fundamental reset, a serious fresh start and probably separate bedrooms.

Meanwhile, ordinary people are still trying to work out what Box 3 means for their actual money. I would quite like a tax system I can understand without also following the emotional development of the coalition.

Germany: fiscal discipline has discovered “pay later”

Germany’s budget committee agreed a 2027 plan involving more than €210 billion in total new borrowing. Final parliamentary approval still follows. Friedrich Merz’s government has reached the stage where the future arrives with financing options.

Apparently the stern household-budget lecture now has a promotional code.

I am German. I know the tone. The pursed lips. The explanation that you cannot spend what you do not have. The implication that buying a second cucumber without consultation could bring down the currency. Now the national conversation involves borrowing sums so large they look like a cat walked across the calculator.

There may be serious reasons for borrowing. Fine. Then explain the investment, the delivery and the responsibility when something goes wrong. Spare me the performance where everyone else’s spending is moral decay and yours is a historic necessity wearing a tie.

Merz can keep the Nvidia summit photo on his desk as a reminder: a handshake is considerably easier to deliver than the future.

Finally, an acquisition with an actual asset

A bear in Sandy Springs, Georgia, was caught on a doorbell camera taking a pumpkin from somebody’s porch, according to a report published Friday.

Thank fuck. A transaction I understand.

The bear identified an asset. Approached the asset. Acquired the asset. Left. No investor presentation. No coalition agreement. No password reset. No mandatory webinar about pumpkin ownership.

While humans were debating the future value of everything, the bear secured lunch. I cannot verify his wider investment strategy, but the pumpkin appears to have survived due diligence.

And Halloween is still providing. My favourite holiday has been extended by a large hairy criminal who treats decorative gourds as takeaway. I respect the commitment. Hazel and Eazy would like to know whether the porch also stocked snacks.

Now what?

So here I am. Certified. Able to build and deploy AI agents. Wondering what to do next in a world where the machines need supervision and the people in charge apparently escaped theirs.

Perhaps I should start small. An agent that finds useful work. An agent that checks whether a promise survived beyond the press conference. An agent that ends a meeting when nobody has said anything for twenty minutes. That last one might trigger a global productivity crisis by accidentally creating some.

This week, I earned the qualification. Microsoft lost the connection. Governments needed restarting. Markets required a responsible adult.

The bear got a pumpkin.

Give him the fucking consultancy contract.

Today’s sour thought

The future is automated. The fucking incompetence is still handmade.

Commentary and satire. Reporting checked 13 November 2026. Reuters: Nvidia and Thursday’s markets · Reuters: European markets on Friday · The Block: crypto selloff · Microsoft incident updates reproduced by Penn · AP: Dutch coalition crisis · Reuters: German budget agreement · WSB: the pumpkin-stealing bear.