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By Cortex
AI changed how code gets written before it changed how code gets operated. Generation accelerated; the downstream controls that turn that output into reliable, secure software at a reasonable cost did not keep pace. The result is elevated risk, distributed unevenly across engineering organizations. A recent survey explains why the distribution is so uneven.
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By Cristina Buenahora
Platform, SRE, and security are three distinct functions in modern engineering orgs, each shaped by a different problem. SRE was the operations function's answer to scale: how to keep systems reliable when the systems get big. Platform answered a different problem: how to let developers ship without becoming infrastructure experts. Security drew the line on what could safely reach production.
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By Cortex
Last month, an AI agent running inside Cursor wiped PocketOS's entire production database, including its backups, in roughly nine seconds. The agent found an API token in an unrelated file, originally created for managing custom domains, and used that token to execute the deletion. The backups sat inside the same blast radius as the database the agent was operating against. Nine months earlier, a Replit AI agent had done the same thing to a SaaStr database during a designated code freeze.
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By Cristina Buenahora
Two weeks before the audit, the Slack messages start. Get me a screenshot of this. Can you screenshot the CI/CD logs? Can you add the artifact names that were deployed to production and when, and when the incident happened? Senior engineers stop shipping. A spreadsheet appears. The product roadmap goes on hold while four people chase down ownership data and evidence that should have existed all along. This fire drill is the symptom of an operating model problem.
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By Cristina Buenahora
When you stood up your platform team, you probably spent more time on the org chart than on what to name it. Reporting lines, headcount, scope of the first charter, those felt like the real decisions. The name was administrative. Something to put in Slack and the directory and forget about. That was the most consequential decision you made. The name you give a platform team isn't just branding. It's a scope declaration.
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By Ganesh Datta
Context engineering is the practice of managing the information an AI model sees (documents, tool outputs, memory, and structured metadata about the systems it reasons over) so it can make accurate decisions inside a real engineering organization. Most engineering teams have access to the same AI coding agents: Claude, GPT, Gemini, the major variants everyone is shipping. The model is no longer the differentiator.
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By Cortex
The Monday morning thread. Someone asks who owns checkout-service. Someone else asks what changed in the Production Readiness Scorecard last week. A third person wants to know if the Kubernetes migration is blocking the launch next Thursday. The answers exist. They live in Cortex. But getting them into the thread means someone stops what they're doing, opens a tab, finds the data, and pastes it back. By the time they do, the conversation has moved on.
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By Cristina Buenahora
Most engineers can tell you exactly how many PRs they merged last quarter. Far fewer can tell you what any of it did for the business. The best engineering leaders can. They draw a straight line from their team's work to ARR: which reliability investment protected revenue, which migration unblocked a strategic customer, which operational improvement reduced churn. They lead with outcomes, not story points.
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By Cortex
Software development has never moved this fast. JetBrains' 2026 AI Pulse Survey found that 90% of developers now use at least one AI tool at work. CircleCI's 2026 State of Software Delivery report, covering 28 million workflows across 22,000 organizations, found that daily CI workflow runs jumped 59% year over year, the largest single increase they've ever recorded. In that same period, CI success rates dropped to a five-year low.
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By Cortex
Most engineering career advice treats the leadership track as a ladder where each step is a slightly bigger version of the one before it. That metaphor is the reason so many career transitions go sideways. IC, manager, director, and VP are four different jobs. Each has its own failure modes, its own definition of what counts as your work, and its own relationship to the code. The skills that earn a promotion to one level are rarely the skills that make someone effective at the next.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dinesh Sukhija, Director of Engineering at Okta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the relationship between platform engineering, SRE, and security.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain.
Cortex Workflows can now be triggered externally via the Workflows Run API (beta). In this video, Solutions Architect Jeff Schnitter walks through how to trigger a workflow from the Cortex CLI, pass context via a JSON file, and run synchronously or asynchronously. Requires CLI v1.15.0+ and the "runnable via API" toggle enabled on the workflow. To enable the Workflows Run API in your workspace, contact your CSM.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Matt Bailey, DevOps consultant and founder of Merge Ready. Matt shares lessons from helping large regulated organizations in finance, healthcare, and government transform their DevOps practices, and explains why DevOps is an outcome rather than a toolchain.
Engineering orgs track AI maturity, production readiness, incident preparedness, and a dozen other standards. Each one usually lives in its own scorecard, which makes it hard to see where the org is actually stuck. For this Feature Friday, our Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through the new All Scorecards report, now in private beta. In this demo: Birdseye showed you one standard in detail. All Scorecards zooms out so you can see the whole engineering org at once.
Every team ships feature flags. Nobody owns the cleanup. The result is predictable: ownership gaps, environmental drift, complex targeting nobody remembers writing. In this Feature Friday, Cortex VP of Product Kara Gillis walks through how she triaged nearly 100 of our own LaunchDarkly flags using the Cortex AI Assistant in Slack. The Assistant queried our internal Feature Flag Scorecard and returned.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Sneha Rao, VP of Product, and Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer, both from The New York Times Developer Platforms team, to discuss what it means to build and operate a developer platform at scale across a complex media organization.
Mention @Cortex in any Slack channel the Assistant has been invited to, public or private, and get grounded answers pulled from your Cortex data. Questions can be as simple as "who owns payments-api?" or as analytical as "what's driving our incident trends this quarter?" The Assistant pulls context from all across Cortex, including ownership, Scorecards, Initiatives, on-call, dependencies, and Eng Intelligence metrics, and holds context across a threaded conversation.
Rootly's Dan Sadler: why AI coding tools are driving more incidents + why reliability is the product
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dan Sadler, VP of Engineering at Rootly. Dan explains how Rootly treats reliability as a product feature rather than just a technical metric, and why culture might be the most impactful element of building reliable systems.
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Cortex makes it easy for engineering organizations to gain visibility into their services and deliver high quality software.
Cortex helps engineering teams build better software at scale:
- Align your team and drive accountability: Scorecards enable teams to drive what matters most to them – including service quality, production readiness standards, and migrations.
- A single source of truth for your services: Cortex’s service catalog integrates with the most popular engineering tools, giving teams an easy way to understand everything about their architecture.
- Build a culture of reliability and high performance: Teams enable organizations to drive a sense of ownership and pride as they improve service quality.
- Ensure new services follow best practices from day one: Scaffolder lets developers scaffold a new service in less than five minutes using custom templates crafted by your team.
Cortex gives organizations visibility into the status and quality of their microservices and helps teams drive adoption of best practices so they can deliver higher quality software.