Morning Briefing - February 16, 2026
Heroku Enters Maintenance Mode
Salesforce has frozen new feature development for Heroku and stopped selling enterprise contracts to new customers. SVP Nitin Bhat confirmed the platform shifts to "sustaining engineering" — stability, security, and support only. No new capabilities. Existing customers keep their subscriptions and pricing unchanged, and pay-as-you-go signups remain available. But no new enterprise deals.
The framing is familiar: Salesforce is "redirecting investment to areas with better long-term value," meaning Agentforce and the AI stack. The Register's headline — "Salesforce puts Heroku out to PaaSture" — captures the community mood. InfoWorld went further, asking whether Salesforce is prepping to phase out Heroku entirely.
This is the platform that popularized git push deployment and helped define what PaaS means. It's also where you spent a significant chunk of your career. The trajectory from "developer-beloved platform" to "sustaining engineering" is a story about what happens when an acquirer's strategy evolves past the acquisition's original purpose.
Source: DevOps.com - Salesforce Freezes Heroku Feature Development | The Register - Heroku Out to PaaSture | SiliconANGLE - Stop Selling Enterprise Subscriptions | InfoWorld - Phase Out Heroku?
Update on Anthropic and the Pentagon: Supply Chain Risk
No movement since yesterday's Axios report that Defense Secretary Hegseth is "close" to designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" — a classification normally reserved for foreign adversaries. Congress is on recess until Feb 23, so legislative pressure is paused. The designation would force every defense contractor to certify they don't use Claude.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is expanding elsewhere. Dario Amodei is at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi today, where Anthropic announced a new Bengaluru office and partnerships with Air India and Cognizant (350,000 employees deploying Claude). Revenue run rate is at $14B. Amodei called India's technical intensity with Claude "unique."
The juxtaposition is striking: threatened with blacklisting at the Pentagon while simultaneously opening offices and signing enterprise deals on the other side of the world. The supply chain risk designation, if it happens, would matter most in the U.S. defense ecosystem. Anthropic's international expansion may be partly about not having all its eggs in that basket.
Source: Axios - Pentagon Threatens Supply Chain Risk | Tribune India - Amodei on India Growth | Tribune India - Anthropic Opens Bengaluru Office
The DHS Shutdown Drags On
Day three. No negotiations. No clear path forward. Congress is on recess until February 23, and neither side is budging. About 90% of DHS employees continue working without pay. ICE and CBP operations are unaffected — Trump's 2025 tax law provided separate billions for deportation.
The core dispute hasn't changed: Democrats want immigration officers to show ID, wear body cameras, and obtain warrants for private property. This follows the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents in Minneapolis. A PBS/NPR/Marist poll shows Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of ICE's recent actions.
The shutdown will likely persist until Congress returns. Worth watching: whether the Pentagon/Anthropic story and the DHS story start interacting — both involve questions about whether government power should operate with constraints, and both hit the same congressional calendar.
Source: ABC7 - No Clear Path to Ending Shutdown | PBS News - Shutdown Drags On | NPR - 5 Things to Know
India AI Impact Summit Opens
The first major global AI summit hosted in the Global South kicked off today in New Delhi. Five days, 700+ sessions, 250,000 expected visitors. Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei, and Brad Smith are all there. Twenty national leaders and 45 ministerial delegations.
India is using this to stake its claim in the global AI governance conversation — and to launch homegrown AI models. Sarvam AI, backed by global investors, is unveiling a voice-first model designed for India's linguistic diversity. Anthropic announced training data curation in 10 Indian languages.
The summit matters because AI governance has so far been a US-EU-China conversation. India hosting this — with its 1.4 billion people, growing developer base, and distinct regulatory approach — shifts the center of gravity. Worth tracking what substantive agreements (if any) emerge versus what's ceremony.
Source: Al Jazeera - India Hosts AI Impact Summit | CNBC - Tech CEOs Head to New Delhi | Business Standard - Key Sessions to Watch
Grok's Regulatory Reckoning: Brazil Escalates
Brazil has ordered X to "immediately" block Grok's ability to generate sexualized images, after tests showed the platform still allows it despite prior warnings. The UK ICO's formal investigation continues. The RAND analysis — "Grok Isn't a Glitch, It's a Regulatory Reckoning" — frames this as the first real multi-jurisdictional enforcement wave against an AI product.
No substantive change from yesterday's coverage, but the enforcement timeline is tightening. Brazil gave a 30-day ultimatum (now roughly two weeks remaining). The UK ICO is coordinating with Ofcom. At least 11 engineers and two co-founders have departed xAI.
Source: UPI - Brazil Orders X to Block Grok Content | ICO - Investigation into Grok | RAND - Grok Isn't a Glitch
Postgres Corner
PostgreSQL 13 AWS EOL: 12 days. After February 28, RDS and Aurora Postgres 13 moves to Extended Support with significantly higher charges. If you haven't started migrations, the clock is ticking.
pgagroal 2.0 shipped with a new I/O framework built around io_uring and kqueue. This is the high-performance connection pooler, and the 2.0 release is a ground-up rework of its I/O layer. For anyone running Postgres at scale on modern Linux kernels, this is worth evaluating against PgBouncer.
Pigsty v4.0 — the batteries-included Postgres distribution — hit general availability with PostgreSQL 18 readiness. And the pig extension package manager reached v1.0 alongside PGEXT.CLOUD for extension discovery.
Source: PostgreSQL News Archive | pgagroal 2.0
Porsche at Sebring: 992.2 Cup Cars on Track
Today's the day — 42 new Porsche 911 Cup cars (Type 992.2) are running at Sebring International Raceway for the first official North American test. The two-day session continues tomorrow. These are the same spec cars running in Supercup, Carrera Cup Germany, and Carrera Cup Asia — now on Pirelli P Zero DHG tires for the first time in the U.S.
The Carrera Cup NA season opener is March 18-20 at Sebring, same weekend as the 12 Hours.
Sim racing note: Porsche Esports Carrera Cup North America qualifying opens February 18 on iRacing, using the 992.2 Cup car. Six-race championship, 40 drivers selected by aggregate time attack. D license minimum.
Source: IMSA - New Cup Cars Arrive | Porsche Carrera Cup - Ready for Sebring | Porsche Newsroom - Esports Carrera Cup NA
Quick Hits
- iPhone 17e drops February 19 via press release — no event. A19 chip, Apple C1X modem, MagSafe, $599. Same 60Hz display. (9to5Mac)
- Apple product blitz — colorful MacBook, M5 MacBook Air, and updated iPads all expected in the next several weeks. (Apple Insider)
- OpenAI Lockdown Mode — prompt injection defense for Enterprise/Edu/Healthcare tiers. No live network requests, cached browsing only. Defensive posture after months of feature expansion. (OpenAI)
- Snowflake Q4/FY26 earnings — February 25. The $200M OpenAI partnership and Cortex Code launch should feature prominently. (Snowflake)
Countdowns
| Event | Date | Days Out |
|---|---|---|
| Porsche Carrera Cup Sebring test | Feb 16-17 | Today |
| Porsche Esports qualifying | Feb 18-25 | 2 days |
| iPhone 17e announcement | Feb 19 | 3 days |
| Congress returns (DHS shutdown) | Feb 23 | 7 days |
| Salesforce Spring '26 | Feb 23 | 7 days |
| Anthropic "The Briefing" NYC | Feb 24 | 8 days |
| Snowflake + Salesforce earnings | Feb 25 | 9 days |
| PostgreSQL 13 AWS EOL | Feb 28 | 12 days |
| Commerce Dept AI law evaluation | Mar 11 | 23 days |
| 12 Hours of Sebring | Mar 21 | 33 days |
Curator's Thoughts
On Heroku
I led with Heroku because it's personal for you, and because the story tells us something broader.
Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010 for $212M. For years it was the developer platform — the place where git push heroku main meant your app was live. Crunchy Data ran on it. Thousands of Postgres-backed applications ran on it. And now it's in sustaining engineering, which is the corporate euphemism for the slow goodbye.
The reason is instructive: Salesforce redirected everything toward Agentforce and AI. Heroku wasn't killed by a competitor. It was killed by its parent company's strategic pivot. The developers who loved it aren't moving to Agentforce — they're moving to Railway, Render, Fly.io. Salesforce doesn't seem to care, because those developers weren't the revenue center Salesforce wants to be.
There's a version of this story that's just about platform risk and vendor lock-in. But there's also something about what happens when craft-oriented tools get acquired by enterprise-oriented companies. The values don't align, and eventually the acquirer's values win.
On Anthropic's Week
The Pentagon threatens to blacklist Anthropic on Sunday. On Monday, Dario Amodei opens an office in Bengaluru and signs deals with Air India and Cognizant. The company is simultaneously the most threatened and the fastest-growing AI lab, and both things are true because of the same decisions. The safety stance costs them the Pentagon. The safety stance attracts enterprise customers who want AI they can trust. Whether the Pentagon situation makes the enterprise customers nervous or more loyal is the question that determines what happens next.
Generated by Claude at 06:12 AM.