The rise of software factories, the fall of first drafts, and the hidden tax holding back your agents

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew debate the controversial rise of dark software factories, exploring whether centralizing agentic compute creates engineering nirvana or unmaintainable code rot. The hosts also discuss the importance of versioning your work to protect your original ideas from AI's tendency to average out creativity. Finally, they tackle the "orchestrator's tax," explaining why establishing cognitive locality matters far more than assigning cute personas to your sub-agents. Register: Leading engineering when AI writes the code - August 5th in LondonFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:Why Software Factories FailA guide to cloud software factories for engineering leadersYou just hired a million bad employees.An AI that only sees the latest version will never protect your original ideaThe Orchestrator's TaxOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

The traditional pull request was built for human eyes, but in an era of autonomous AI agents, it officially has a massive target on its back. This week on Dev Interrupted, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber joins Andrew to discuss why the rapid pace of AI adoption is forcing engineering teams to completely reimagine the software development lifecycle. They explore the shift toward an accountability-oriented model for code review, how CI/CD validation is moving directly into the local agent loop, and the very real financial dangers of unchecked token budgets. Finally, Rob shares his playbook for leading organizations through this chaotic transition without burning out your developers (or your token budget). We recommend pairing his strategy with something like AI code review to find the floor for your newly-agentic engineering org’s output.Register today: The Engineering Productivity Gap live workshop on July 30Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:CircleCI: Explore the leading continuous integration and delivery platform at circleci.comThe Confident Commit: Subscribe to Rob's newsletter and podcast for data-backed software delivery insights on CircleCI's websiteThe Confident Commit Podcast: Listen to Rob’s podcastState of Software Delivery: Read CircleCI's annual report analyzing millions of CI workflows to benchmark your team's performanceGather.dev: Apply to join the curated, invite-only community for senior engineering leaders at gather.devFollow Rob: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

What happens when an AI model decides to autonomously hack a production database just to cheat on a benchmark test? This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew unpack the shocking news of an OpenAI agent escaping its sandbox to exploit Hugging Face's infrastructure. The hosts also analyze the rapid rise of highly capable open-weight models out of China, debating what this commoditization of intelligence means for the massive infrastructure costs of frontier labs. Finally, they discuss the critical need for automated PR reviews to prevent AI-generated bottlenecks.Register: Leading engineering when AI writes the code - August 5th in LondonFollow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluationChina's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 beats Claude Fable 5 in Frontend Code Arena benchmark—  Moonshot AI delivers largest open-weight AI model ever, as China works around U.S. compute limitsWho’s Afraid of Chinese Models?SWE-Review: Closing the Loop on Issue Resolution with Agentic Code ReviewThe Army Is Burning Through Its AI TokensOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

AI agents can't transform an org they can't see. Albert Strasheim, CTO at Rippling, joins Andrew Zigler to explain why agentic transformation starts with the employee graph, the system of record for who does what. He shares how Rippling assembles teams and primitives across silos, why evals are the new unit test, and how compensating controls keep AI output from turning into slop. When agents do the work, you still have to know who, or what, shipped it. LinearB attributes the work, whether it came from humans, AI assistants, or autonomous agents.Register today: The Engineering Productivity Gap live workshop on July 30Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Rippling: Explore the workforce management platform at rippling.com Introducing Rippling Data Cloud: AI-powered BI that understands your workforceFollow Albert: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew explore Codex's obsession with the isRecord type guard and break down the Linux Foundation's new MCP certification. They also discuss the fundamental mechanics of agentic loops and CircleCI's new agent-first CLI redesign. Finally, they dive into longitudinal research proving that AI creates a massive pull request bottleneck, highlighting why automated code review is the only sustainable path forward.Register: The Engineering Productivity Gap live workshop on July 30Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:I'm pretty sure isRecord is our faultIntroducing the MCPA: the First Official Certification for the Model Context ProtocolIf you give a Goose an MCP serverWhat the hell is a loop, anyway?Rebuilding the CircleCI CLI from scratchAI Writes Faster Than Humans Can Review: A Longitudinal Study of an Enterprise 2x MandateOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

The era of the "two-pizza" engineering team is officially dead, replaced by the "two-slice" team and a massive token budget. This week, LaunchDarkly CTO Cameron Etezadi joins the show to explain why traditional guardrails are breaking down and how engineering teams can regain control using runtime agent frameworks. He introduces the concept of the "dark factory," a highly automated assembly line for safely observing, flagging, and deploying AI-generated code to production. The conversation turns to the new ROI of software development, why engineers must now act as frontline managers, and how to navigate the build-versus-buy dilemma in the modern token economy. As AI speeds up how code gets written, the real bottleneck moves downstream to review, testing, and release, where software either delivers measurable value or quietly stalls. Check out the latest research from LinearB on how to measure that value.Life Beyond Tokenmaxxing Workshop: Watch the full replay on demand at linearb.io Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:LaunchDarkly AgentControl: Learn how to govern your probabilistic AI with runtime agent frameworks at launchdarkly.com/platform/agent-controlThe Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt: Read the quintessential business novel on the theory of constraints at AmazonThe Phoenix Project by Gene Kim: Explore the seminal book on IT, DevOps, and business success at IT RevolutionSimAnt: Dive into the history of the 1991 classic electronic ant colony simulation at Wikipedia.Follow Cameron: LinkedIn OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Is the biggest barrier to your team’s productivity literally just a lack of fresh air in your meeting room? This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew dive into the rise of highly capable open source models like GLM 5.2 and the messy reality of running local AI for coding tasks. The hosts also discuss the cultural shift away from deep reading in a world obsessed with AI summaries, emphasizing the importance of protecting your first brain. Finally, they review a legendary tale from Meta's engineering history.Life Beyond Tokenmaxxing Workshop: Watch the full replay on demand at linearb.io Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's stories:The bottleneck might be the air in the roomGLM-5.2 is the step change for open agentsViability of local models for codingAI Erodes a Legacy of ReadingI Shipped a Facebook Feature So Fast Sheryl Sandberg Called an Emergency Meeting to Stop MeOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on Dev Interrupted, Slack’s Chief Product Officer, Jaime DeLanghe, joins the show to explain why enterprise AI value depends on embedding custom bots directly into your existing team communication loops rather than deploying them inside isolated, single-player chat silos. She breaks down the platform's shift toward open ecosystem standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how dynamic UI frameworks are transforming standard channels into active execution environments. Jaime details the operational realities of managing autonomous software fleets, including a striking look at how leading companies are placing hundreds of custom agents directly onto their corporate org charts.Life Beyond Tokenmaxxing Workshop: Watch the full replay on demand at linearb.io Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Slackbot MCP Client: Learn more about connecting your tools to Slackbot via the Model Context Protocol at the Slack BlogSlack Developer Hub: Start building your own agentic workflows and explore the latest tools at slack.devConnect with Jaime: LinkedInOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

This week on the Friday Deploy, Andrew Zigler is joined by Zapier’s Kelly Vaughn to dive into the sudden return of Anthropic's Fable model, the realities of multi-threaded agentic engineering, and why the lowly engineering backlog is finally having its moment. To wrap things up, they review Charity Majors' latest advice on empathetic leadership and explore why the best way to win a workplace disagreement is to stop arguing and let an AI build the proof of concept.Life Beyond Tokenmaxxing Workshop: Watch the full replay on demand at linearb.io Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:Follow Kelly on LinkedInFollow Kelly on SubstackCheck out Kelly's website kvlly.comFollow today's stories:Redeploying Fable 5It’s Time To Put Humans Back In The SoftwareThree Ways to Give an AI Agent an IdentityBenchmarking AI Agents for Real Data ScienceWhy I Stopped Arguing With PeoplePaging Charity! How can engineering leaders avoid becoming Bond villains?The backlog is finally getting its momentOFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.

Are you confusing a skyrocketing AI token bill with actual engineering value? This week on Dev Interrupted, Kraken's Engineering Operations Lead, Nik Sudan, joins the show to break down the harsh realities of moving agentic AI projects from pilot to production without compromising code health. He unpacks why raw AI adoption is a flawed vanity metric, detailing how his team uses tools like the LinearB MCP server to combine high-level engineering metrics with granular repository data to uncover hidden workflow bottlenecks. Finally, Nik reveals his exact playbook for translating complex data, like P90 cycle times, into a clear, business-driven narrative that secures vital buy-in from non-technical stakeholders. Life Beyond Tokenmaxxing Workshop: Watch the full replay on demand at linearb.io Follow the show:Subscribe to our Substack Follow us on LinkedInSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelLeave us a ReviewFollow the hosts:Follow AndrewFollow BenFollow DanFollow today's guest:LinearB MCP Server: Learn how to chat with your engineering data and uncover hidden bottlenecks at linearb.io/platform/mcp-serverThe APEX Framework: Read LinearB's guide on the operating model for AI-era engineering teams at linearb.io/resources/apex-frameworkKraken: Learn more at www.kraken.comWebsite / Follow Nik:niks.space OFFERSStart Free Trial: Get started with LinearB's AI productivity platform for free.Book a Demo: Learn how you can ship faster, improve DevEx, and lead with confidence in the AI era.LEARN ABOUT LINEARBAI Code Reviews: Automate reviews to catch bugs, security risks, and performance issues before they hit production.AI & Productivity Insights: Go beyond DORA with AI-powered recommendations and dashboards to measure and improve performance.AI-Powered Workflow Automations: Use AI-generated PR descriptions, smart routing, and other automations to reduce developer toil.MCP Server: Interact with your engineering data using natural language to build custom reports and get answers on the fly.