Title: Issue #222: Voice-controlled humanoid robots 😱
Publication: Ready, Set, Cloud!
Series: Ready, Set, Cloud Picks of the Week
Author: Allen Helton
Published: June 29, 2026
URL: https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/222/

The time is here where we actually can control fleets of humanoid robots by our voice. What's next?!


### 🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is [Sarah Hoffmann](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-hoffmann-19777323/), freelance software developer and the mastermind behind much of the [geocoder behind openstreetmap](https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim). She's a prolific open source contributor and genuine innovator in an underappreciated space. Thank you so much for everything you do, Sarah!

### 💯 Spotlight

The future is now. [Cyrus Wong](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cyruswong/) wrote an article about how he built a mechanism to [voice-control a fleet of humanoid robots](https://builder.aws.com/content/3FG3tWBDtXfw57oqGIqVp82XE7d/voice-controlling-a-humanoid-robotics-fleet-with-amazon-bedrock-agentcore-and-amazon-nova-2-sonic). Yes, it sounds like the basis of a sci-fi movie, but it's real! And Cyrus does an exceptional job at explaining some of the technical hurdles he overcame, like building a secure handshake between Cognito and AgentCore Gateway and cost saving levers for stateful connections. He even animated some avatars representing the human and AI assistant for a more immersive experience. Extremely cool, extremely scary.

### 🔥 My Favorite Content

I've really been enjoying this zip file saga from [Paul Santus](https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsantus). It started with a blog post from [Jérémie Rodon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremierodon/) showing how he zipped a bunch of files from S3 in Lambda. Then Paul took a stab at it with a different approach. Now he's back again with a write up on [how he massively improved his design](https://dev.to/aws-builders/zipping-15gb-of-s3-files-in-11s-how-the-power-of-community-made-it-possible-5fgg) with staggering results. Seeing incremental improvements like this every couple of weeks has been great because we not only get a better outcome, but we also get to see Paul's thought process on a problem we've all had in one way or another. Cool takeaways from this one are latency considerations with Step Functions (which seems to counter what Lee Harding said last issue) and the value of the `UploadPartCopy` command.

I wrote a blog post last week on an observation I made writing this newsletter. I've mentioned it a few times before, but we're seeing less and less deep technical content or shared stories of novel builds recently. I've thought a lot about why this is happening and I've reached my conclusion. I *think* what's happening is many developers are spending their time [taking their side projects to production as micro-SaaS apps](https://www.readysetcloud.io/blog/allen.helton/that-probably-doesnt-need-to-be-saas/) instead of leaving them as hobby projects and sharing the lessons they learned. I'd be curious to hear if you agree or not. It's a bit of a hot take, but grounded in weeks of evidence.

In a classic, *there's an exception to every rule* moment, [Lee Gilmore](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-james-gilmore/) counters my argument from above perfectly with his post last week on [why he built his own CRM](https://www.studyfromexperts.com/blogs/why-we-built-our-own-crm-for-under-5-using-aws-kiro/). Lee has sound reasoning in the build vs buy argument for this case and does a phenomenal job explaining how he built it. I love how Lee is building in public and bringing his years of experience with him to educate others. Wonderful explanation of how and why to build your own CRM.

Earlier this year I tried my hand at building an incident response agent. It works reasonably well, but has its share of security issues (don't they all). [Marcos Henrique](https://www.linkedin.com/in/devopmh/) published an article last week sharing [his version of an incident response agent](https://dev.to/aws-builders/every-alarm-is-a-crime-scene-meet-poirot-the-read-only-incident-detective-58pa) that is WAY better. He goes through his (correct) choice of making the agent read-only and walks through how he's taken a pattern from Danielle Heberling and adapted it for his use case. It's the community building on the community. These are the types of stories that warm my heart *and* my brain.

### 💡 Tip of the Week

I loved [AJ Stuyvenberg](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-stuyvenberg/)'s hot take on X last week about Lambda MicroVMs and how they shouldn't be used to build AI agents. The comments are great conversation and really pushes AJ's point that if you want a runtime purpose-built for agents, find one that doesn't charge you for idle time during inference.



### Last Words

Last issue I said I was going to start adding flair for articles that were clearly written by AI. I built the flair component into both Ready, Set, Cloud and my newsletter backend service ready to try it out this week, BUT I DIDN'T HAVE TO!! Great job everyone bringing in your voice. I know eventually I'll need to use the robot flair, but I hope that day is a while off. I think we could all [take a page out of Marc Brooker's book](https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/06/18/my-blog-and-ai.html) on this topic.

That's my take on the week, but what's yours?

What did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you're reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/allenheltondev), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenheltondev/), or [email](mailto:allenheltondev@gmail.com).

Happy coding!

Allen