Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Everyone keeps saying we don't need junior engineers anymore. This episode makes the case that's exactly wrong. Rob sits down with two CircleCI colleagues at opposite ends of the experience spectrum: Hanabel Mengistu, a new grad less than a year into her first engineering role, and Michael Webster, who has been writing software professionally since 2012. Together they explore what it actually feels like to enter the industry right now, when AI has reshuffled the deck for everyone.

AURA does not have to live on your laptop. Install it into the cluster with Helm and it is still there the next time something breaks. AURA is a fully open source AI agent built specifically for SRE work. Rather than one general assistant, you configure workers: separate agent roles, each scoped to a job like inspecting the cluster.

Wondering what the catch is on a free, vendor-backed agent? There is not one in the license. AURA stays Apache 2, fully capable, and free to run. If you are weighing an open source tool with a company behind it, the first question is what the catch is. You have seen the project that turns out to be open core, or that is quietly hindered in one key way. This is Mezmo's answer for AURA.

The most common question since we started 31 Days of AURA: how do you plan to make money? The short answer is the control plane, not the agent. Mezmo sells an enterprise-grade control plane for running large numbers of agents across large environments, where coordinating across environments, governance, access control, and the efficiency of preprocessing MCP data start to matter. If a hundred people run AURA and three or four of them need that, the model works. The more people running AI agents in production, the bigger the market for the tooling underneath them.