Instantiations

After the FAST Smalltalk conference in Argentina, our Instantiations team got together for a coding meetup at Estancia La Caledonia in Cañuelas. This is where the Pact of Cañuelas was signed in 1829 to end the fighting in Buenos Aires Province. Beautiful place. Lots of history. And, in standard fashion, my team and I walked in and immediately checked the Starlink connection, and then requested Wi-Fi repeaters which the hosts were gracious to provide. We did eventually look around. Between the conference and the meetup, we've had a lot to share and work on: • Improving the VAST AI Assistant and how it helps developers work with existing applications. • Bringing AI agents into Smalltalk through the VAST ADK (Agent Development Kit), connecting them to tools through MCP, and giving them interactive interfaces through A2UI. • Exploring conversational development: talking to the running Smalltalk environment to navigate code, inspect objects, run tests, and work through problems. We're also seeing changes in our own engineering process. We can now generate code faster than our build, testing, and release processes can handle it. That's a new engineering problem, and we're working on it. Getting together gives us time to try ideas and make decisions that are harder to make across meetings and time zones. Thanks to everyone who organized FAST and made us feel welcome in Argentina. It's also why I think executive leadership needs to be hands on right now. We have to understand firsthand what this means for our businesses and our people. The pace of AI is changing how we develop software, how teams work, and where we spend our time. The discipline of AI-assisted development is still evolving. It's also leading people to question where their experience, skills, and judgment fit, and how the value they bring is changing. There are still a lot of open questions. Leadership needs to be involved in that work. Get close enough to understand what people are experiencing, help establish the discipline, and lead the way through it. #VASTPlatform #Smalltalk #FAST2026 #AgenticAI

Before you modernize, ask this: How will you protect decades of business knowledge, maintain operational continuity, and reduce regulatory risk during transformation? Our Executive Governance Framework provides a roadmap. Download your copy of our Modernization Readiness Scorecard today! #modernization #enterpriseIT #governance #responsibleevolution #Instantiations

"Who is still using Smalltalk?" I've been asked that question for years, usually with more skepticism than curiosity. The assumption is simple: once the industry stops talking about a technology, it must be fading away. That assumption is wrong. VAST is a Smalltalk-based development platform used to build and maintain long-lived enterprise systems. Smalltalk is one of the original object-oriented languages, and one of its defining traits is a live programming environment where developers work directly with running systems. It powers systems that still perform critical business functions in many of the world's largest enterprises, spanning finance, insurance, healthcare, and government. I’ve seen this from a few angles: customer, engineer, and now CEO of Instantiations. I’ve watched a lot of technologies come and go. Big promises. Big budgets. Big marketing hype. Then silence. Meanwhile, VAST kept doing the work. I've spent years deep in that stack: from VM internals and JIT optimization to developer tooling and OS integration. That is not trendy engineering. It is durable engineering. And durable engineering is what survives after the trend cycle burns through another generation of tools. Being both an engineer and a business owner changes how you see this. Novelty without responsibility creates churn. Stability without evolution creates decay. The discipline between those extremes is understanding where customers actually feel pain, where real value can be created, and where that value supports a commercial case to keep investing. Doing good business brings you more business. Not because you chased the newest architecture. Because you solved problems customers actually had. Real modernization is not about proving you are current. It is about making sure critical systems keep serving the business without losing the knowledge that made them valuable in the first place. I never spent much energy worrying about whether Smalltalk was dead. Plenty of people told me, very confidently, that it was. Many of the articles declaring it dead are now old enough to be legacy systems themselves. I decided it was not. So we kept going. We kept finding people who wanted to do serious work on serious systems. When we couldn't find them, we grew them. We invested in smart, curious people who learned the platform, then invested back into our customers and company. That is how mature technology stays alive. Not by nostalgia. By renewal. AI will accelerate that learning curve. But it will not solve the real risk in long-lived enterprise systems: Knowledge decay. When teams stop understanding a system, replacement starts to look inevitable. Often, the system did not fail. The stewardship did. The technology did not become worthless. The organization stopped doing the hard work of renewal. In enterprise software, endurance is not luck. It is a competitive advantage earned over decades. #ResponsibleEvolution #Smalltalk

The most expensive technology decision a company can make often starts with a simple sentence: “This system is too old. We have to replace it.” Sometimes that’s true. But more often, the real issue is not the technology. It’s knowledge decay. A mission-critical system that has run for 20 years is not just code. It is institutional memory. It is regulatory trade-offs. It is thousands of real-world decisions made under pressure. Systems rarely collapse overnight. What collapses first is understanding. When organizations stop investing in tooling, training, and structured evolution, risk accumulates quietly. Documentation does not just thin out. It becomes confidently wrong. The system evolves. The recorded history does not. Eventually, replacement feels inevitable. Not because the system failed, but because the discipline around it did. I have watched companies discard decades of operational value this way. That is why at Instantiations we formalized something we have practiced for years: Responsible Evolution™ A disciplined approach to modernization built on three principles: • Enablement: Equip and strengthen your people • Continuity: Protect and extend what already works • Augmentation: Improve decision quality, not just tooling Before approving your next rewrite or AI initiative, pause and ask: Are we evolving systems that still work, or replacing “old technology” simply because it is old? The companies that endure are not defined by how fast they modernize. They are defined by how deliberately they evolve. That is Responsible Evolution. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/eZs8X3mD #TechnologyLeadership #Modernization #ArtificialIntelligence #EnterpriseArchitecture #ResponsibleEvolution

When knowledge lives in people, risk scales quietly. Make it visible. Evaluate before you modernize.

Enterprise systems rarely fail overnight. What disappears first is clarity. When institutional knowledge erodes, modernization becomes slower, riskier, and harder to govern. Responsible Evolution™ helps organizations modernize while preserving the operational knowledge that keeps critical systems stable. Download the modernization risk assessment checklist.