Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last month I was making a change to sx, our CLI. I updated a core flow, adding external catalogs as a source for sx add. Small change. Then came the testing. I knew I was messing with a core flow and wanted to be sure I hadn't broken anything. I spent about forty-five minutes setting up an isolated environment. Spinning up Docker. Fighting with tmux. Getting a clean install state I could run through the TUI a few times. Forty-five minutes of my afternoon that produced zero code. I complained in Slack.

Let me paint a picture. Your company has rolled out Claude or ChatGPT as the standard AI tool. You've connected MCPs to Stripe, your HRIS, Datadog, your CRM, and Slack. A senior engineer set this up because they needed to answer hard cross-system questions and it works beautifully. Now a marketing intern sits down, opens the same LLM harness with the same MCP config, and types "show me revenue by customer for the last 12 months." They get it.

Here's something nobody talks about at the AI strategy meetings. Your organization just spent six figures on Cursor licenses, Claude seats, and Copilot subscriptions. Ninety percent of your engineers have access. By most internal measures, the rollout was a success. But somewhere on your team, one developer is running circles around everyone else.

Don: The debate is over - how should you structure your software teams? That question is now answered in this year's State of DevOps report 2023. Other questions answered include: How does AI affect my company and team performance? How can we quantify the impact of culture on performance burnout? What even is culture in the first place? All these things are included in the State of DevOps report 2023. We have a very special guest, Eric Maxwell from the DORA group, to offer his takes on the report.

Every team has a workflow, even if it’s chaotic or lacks consistency. It’s a no-brainer, though, that in the fast-paced world of software development, a clear and well-defined path to guide your work is essential to move efficiently. Workflows provide just that — the structure and framework that developers need to streamline their processes, collaborate effectively, and optimize productivity.

If you want to make software engineering easy to improve, then automate actions in your development process. These simple yet high-impact “if this, then that” conditions pack a punch toward reducing toil and cognitive load. Your developers choose what’s important to improve and reap the benefits of an efficient and optimized development environment.

Smart notifications and nudges are table stakes tools for developers looking to streamline their work and stay focused on building improvements. These automatic alerts are key to a more efficient workflow, freeing us from the burden of repetitive, overwhelming, and time critical tasks — aka, toil.

Every team has guardrails, whether you recognize them or not. They’re a form of automation that can have significant impact on your software development process and the people doing the work. They’re another way to give toil the boot and keep developers in the flow. We’ve made the case for engineering automation in a previous article; here’s how guardrails as automations ensure that agreed upon boundaries and ways of working are codified into team processes.

When you survey developers on how to improve engineering practices and their daily job experience, their answers invariably include getting rid of little annoying things - what's called toil. Toil is manual and repetitive tasks that waste your time. Toil is arguably worse than crisis, because a crisis is temporary and firefighting can feel rewarding when it's over. Toil is more like a death march - an insidious force that eventually leads to burnout.

Sleuth's new Goals dashboard helps teams set, track, and achieve their goals. Here's how it works.