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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.
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By Cristina Buenahora
Tamar Bercovici has been at Box for 15 years. She leads the core platform, the backend layer that storage, search, metadata, and AI capabilities all run on. When her systems go down, Box goes down. On a recent episode of the Braintrust podcast, she said the debate around AI-generated code tends to focus on whether the models will write clean code and/or introduce bugs. Tamar's focus is somewhere else entirely.
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By Cortex
Every engineering team wants to ship high-quality, reliable software quickly. Historically, engineers used a few guiding principles to help them consistently write clean code: keep code DRY, shift security left, write solid test cases, own your services, document your runbooks, and more.
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By Cortex
Though AI tools have made individual developers dramatically more productive at writing code, most engineering organizations report moving only about 20% faster than before. As Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors recently wrote, "AI came for code generation first because it was the easiest problem to solve, but it was never the thing holding developers back.".
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By Cortex
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 recently brought the cloud native community to Amsterdam. We were there all week bouncing between the booth, a Braintrust event with engineering leaders from across the community, and more hallway conversations than we can count. One talking point dominated the week: AI is shipping code faster than most engineering orgs can govern it. It also became clear that we weren't the only ones talking about this challenge.
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.
@cortex611 co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box, who spent 15 years at the company growing from senior IC to leading its core platform organization, to talk about what engineering leadership looks like at each level of the org.
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tamar Bercovici, VP of Engineering at Box, who spent 15 years at the company growing from senior IC to leading its core platform organization, to talk about what engineering leadership looks like at each level of the org.
The Cortex AI Assistant in Slack puts your engineering data and analysis right where your team already works. Ask questions in plain language, about your services, deployments, incidents, initiatives, and more, and get real answers without leaving Slack.
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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.