Brian Wald
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Articles by Brian Wald
Die versteckte Steuer auf jeden KI-generierten Merge Request | Computer Weekly
Informatik 2 hours ago Im Test: Elixirs 1.20 neues intelligentes Typsystem heise online - Stefan Wintermeyer • 2h Das Typsystem von Elixir 1.20 analysiert jedes Sprachkonstrukt, erkennt fehlerhafte Argumente und verfolgt sie auch. Eine Funktion erwartet eine Zahl, … Künstliche Intelligenz 9 hours ago Erfinder des USB-Sticks: „Intel hat gelitten, aber die Welt hat profitiert“ futurezone.at - Florian Christof • 9h Wir haben Dov Moran zum Interview getroffen.
As agentic development accelerates, workflow auditability becomes a bottleneck Original
I recently worked with a senior engineering leader at a major financial institution to review their DevSecOps platform roadmap. On the surface, everything appeared normal. Their team had already embedded an AI coding agent into the development workflow. Merge requests (MRs) were flowing, pipelines were executing cleanly, and delivery velocity seemed to be improving.
As agentic dev tools boom, workflow auditability becomes the constraint
Recently, I was working with a senior engineering leader at a large financial institution to review their DevSecOps platform engineering roadmap. Their team had deployed an AI coding agent into the development workflow. Merge requests (MRs) were being opened, pipelines were running, and velocity metrics were moving in the right direction.
The Hidden Productivity Tax Of AI-Generated Code
While AI has accelerated code generation, it hasn’t eliminated bottlenecks. Instead, they’ve been shifted downstream to the review queue and senior engineers are feeling the pressure. We can see this in developer workloads. AI-generated merge requests (MRs) still need review, testing and approval. GitLab research shows that Australian developers lose around 7 hours per week to inefficient processes, reflecting the AI productivity paradox.
The Hidden Productivity Tax of AI-Generated Code
GUEST OPINION: While AI has accelerated code generation, it hasn’t eliminated bottlenecks. Instead, they’ve been shifted downstream to the review queue, and senior engineers are feeling the pressure. We can see this in developer workloads. AI-generated merge requests (MRs) still need review, testing, and approval. GitLab research shows that Australian developers lose around 7 hours per week to inefficient processes, reflecting the AI productivity paradox.
Take Control of AI Development with Enterprise-Grade Governance
Consider what a CIO faces right now. Your developers want to experiment with the latest AI coding assistants. Every week brings a new model, agent, or tool promising productivity gains that don’t yet have an appropriate measurement framework. Which ones do you approve? Who owns the workflow when three teams select three different agents? How do you make confident decisions when the competitive landscape shifts completely every few months? Two distinct paths are emerging in response to this challenge.
The Invisible Cost of AI-Generated Code Reviews
AI coding tools haven't eliminated bottlenecks. They've relocated them to the review queue, placing growing pressure on your most experienced engineers. This outcome follows a predictable pattern. As teams expand, code generation accelerates, but review expertise doesn't scale at the same rate. If you measure AI adoption by MR volume, lines of code, or seat usage, you're only tracking inputs, not the real bottleneck.
The hidden tax on AI-assisted development
By Brian Wald, Head of Global Field CTO Org at GitLab AI coding tools promised to speed up software delivery. For many teams, they have, but the gains are accumulating in generation rather than throughput. The real slowdown now lives in the review queue, and it carries a cost most teams aren’t tracking. The pattern is worth examining closely. As teams grow, code generation increases, but review expertise doesn’t scale at the same rate.
There’s a hidden tax on every AI-generated merge request
AI coding tools haven’t removed bottlenecks. They’ve moved them to the review queue, putting more pressure on senior engineers. This result isn’t surprising: As teams grow, code generation increases, but review expertise doesn’t scale the same way. If you measure AI adoption by MR (merge request) volume, lines of code, or seat usage, you’re only tracking inputs, not the real bottleneck.
Enterprise AI Development Needs Air Traffic Control
By Brian Wald, Head of Global Field CTO org at GitLab Every week brings a new model, agent, or tool promising productivity gains that nobody can measure consistently yet. For CIOs, the decisions compound faster than the answers. Which tools get approved? Who owns the workflow when three teams pick three different agents? And how do you make those decisions when the field may look entirely different in three months? Two distinct paths are emerging in response to this challenge.
Best of 2025: Five Trends That Will Drive Software Development in 2025 - DevOps.com
Over the past year, developers have eagerly adopted generative AI to accelerate coding and streamline their workflows. In GitLab’s latest DevSecOps survey, 78% of respondents said they are using AI for software development or plan to do so in the next two years. In 2025, developers will broaden the scope of how they use AI with promising new applications for reducing technical debt and improving security.
7 Ways To Build High-Performance Development Teams in Asia Pacific
In the dynamic and ever-evolving Asia Pacific tech landscape, where teams often work across multiple time zones and diverse markets, building a high-performance development team is about more than just hiring great engineers. It’s about creating an environment where they can collaborate effectively, adapt quickly, and focus on delivering real business value. High-performing teams drive innovation and efficiency.
7 foundational elements for a high-performing dev team
When specialists with complementary abilities unite around shared goals and collaborate effectively, they form a high-performance team capable of producing outstanding results. High-performing teams are the engine of innovation and efficiency in any software development organization. Their success stems from producing high-quality software while effectively navigating the complex environments of large organizations.
7 Tips for Building High-Performance Development Teams
High-performing teams are the engine of innovation and efficiency in any software development organization. Their success stems from producing high-quality software while effectively navigating the complex environments of large organizations. They balance competing priorities, adapt to evolving technologies, and collaborate across diverse, often siloed, teams.
Evolving Shift Left Security: A More Powerful Approach to Software Development Security
Enterprises today must contend with the dual challenge of maintaining robust security while enabling rapid software innovation. As cyberthreats become more sophisticated, the shift left approach to achieving this balance does not go far enough. Development teams need a more comprehensive approach to ensuring rock-solid security throughout the development life cycle, including later stages such as runtime and post-release.
Five Trends That Will Drive Software Development in 2025 - staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud
Over the past year, developers have eagerly adopted generative AI to accelerate coding and streamline their workflows. In GitLab’s latest DevSecOps survey, 78% of respondents said they are using AI for software development or plan to do so in the next two years. In 2025, developers will broaden the scope of how they use AI with promising new applications for reducing technical debt and improving security.
Five Trends That Will Drive Software Development in 2025 - DevOps.com
Over the past year, developers have eagerly adopted generative AI to accelerate coding and streamline their workflows. In GitLab’s latest DevSecOps survey, 78% of respondents said they are using AI for software development or plan to do so in the next two years. In 2025, developers will broaden the scope of how they use AI with promising new applications for reducing technical debt and improving security.
Five Trends That Will Drive Software Development in 2025 - DevOps.com
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5 Steps to Build a Standardized Software Development Platform
As organizations grow, the urgency to deliver software quickly often leads to a patchwork of tools, processes and practices. Different teams may create their own solutions to meet immediate needs, resulting in a fragmented development environment. This lack of cohesion is not just inefficient, it’s risky. Inconsistent tools and processes create bottlenecks, increase the likelihood of errors and make it difficult to enforce security standards uniformly.
Supercharge DevSecOps Workflows and Drive Business Results With Platform Engineering : @VMblog
By Brian Wald, Head of Global Field CTO org at GitLab Most development teams have experienced the productivity gains of adopting DevSecOps methodologies and the corresponding tools and processes. Recent research has found that C-level executives identified faster iteration, better code quality, improved operational efficiency, and more secure applications as the top benefits of implementing DevSecOps.
Integrate AI Into Developer Workflows
AI’s role in democratizing technology is reshaping the way we operate, and software developers are at the heart of this revolution. While many developers fear how AI may affect their careers, they also wield tremendous power in shaping how the revolution plays out. Their role is evolving from code creation to influencing the use of AI tools.
Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today
In 2001, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer complained that “Linux is a cancer.” The future Los Angeles Clippers owner was referring to how Linux’s open source license — The General Public License — necessitate all the software it is built on be transformed into open source as well. His fears were overblown, but also prescient in a way he probably didn’t realize. Twenty years on, it is Linux — not Windows — is the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure.
Astro Launches New Server Islands and Partners With Netlify
Astro had a big week, announcing its 4.12 release along with a new partnership with Netlify, which now sponsors Astro as its official deployment partner. We’ll be covering the partnership in more depth next week, but the big news in this Astro release is that it includes the first experimental release of Server Islands, which are the framework’s “new solution to integrate high-performance static HTML and dynamic server-generated components together.” Astro introduced islands in 2021.
The Looming Crisis in the Observability Market
The observability market is on the rise. Research firm MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the market will grow from $2.4 billion in 2023 to $4.1 billion by 2028 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.7%. KBV Research is also bullish on this market, predicting it will grow at a CAGR of 12.3% to reach $5.1 billion in 2030. Those estimates almost certainly undervalue the market.
Creating a Strategic Roadmap for Effective AI Implementation
Enterprises are no longer experimenting with generative AI; they are integrating the technology into their core operations to drive efficiency, innovation and competitive advantage. Whether your company is an AI early adopter or just beginning its journey, your focus must be on integrating AI to deliver tangible results. Success requires a strategic approach that ensures the AI solutions you implement align with business goals and provide qualitative and quantitative benefits.
What Does It Mean to Keep Clusters Lean?
Managing clusters cost-effectively is becoming increasingly essential as Kubernetes becomes the de facto standard for building modern software delivery platforms. This process has led to the buzzy mantra of “keeping clusters lean.” Are you practicing DevOps? That means you’re lean! Lean principles lie at the heart of the DevOps methodology.
Valkey Will Not Just Be a Redis Retread
Think again if you’ve assumed the Linux Foundation’s Valkey project will just be a clone of the Redis database. The project’s maintainers — liberated from years of Redis’ tight leadership — want to evolve the key-value store to meet the emerging demands of today’s workloads and hardware platforms.
Sustainability: How Did Amazon, Azure, Google Perform in 2023?
The leading cloud providers and the mammoth global companies that run them are adopting environmentally sustainable practices, but it is a complicated work in progress. As Amazon, Google and Microsoft continue to grow, they’re all grappling with the challenges of reducing their carbon emissions in the face of increased resource usage of AI, while making the right investments in renewable energy infrastructure around the world.
Why Do Developers Lose 1 Day a Week to Inefficiencies?
The author has worked for DX as a contractor. Sixty-nine percent of developers lose at least eight hours a week — one working day per week — to largely fixable inefficiencies, according to a new survey. What’s standing in their way? Their own managers. The report on developer experience (DevEx), released Monday by Atlassian and DX, found a yawning gulf between what developers and IT managers think has the most impact on developer productivity and job satisfaction.
The Critical Path to Superalignment as AI Invades the Enterprise
The concept of “superalignment,” once a niche topic confined to science fiction and academic computer science, entered everyday conversation after OpenAI disbanded its superalignment team. Superalignment aims to ensure that future superhuman AI systems adhere to human ethics and objectives — an undeniably laudable ambition.
VMware's 'Private Cloud' Solution Emerges Under Broadcom
VMware Cloud Foundation’s (VCF) new configuration was eagerly awaited. There have been many questions about what VCF would look like exactly and, more importantly, what it would mean for DevOps customers now that VCF is under the Broadcom umbrella.
How to Migrate CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux
The former Red Hat CentOS 7 Linux distribution is dead. It was a fun ride but it’s over. You could upgrade CentOS 7 to CentOS Stream but most are leery of doing so (because of the rolling release nature of Stream). The other option would be to migrate to one of the alternative distributions, such as AlmaLinux. Sounds complicated, right?
How to Apply Microservice Architecture to Embedded Systems
It’s no wonder that microservices architecture is foundational to the distributed applications published by global enterprises like Facebook, Netflix and Uber. Isolating services at a fine grain and then aggregating them to work in concert makes for distributed systems less cumbersome to manage than monolithic systems.
What's New With the Just-Released Linux 6.10 Kernel
The latest Linux kernel, 6.10, is out. Linus Torvalds wasn’t happy about how the last days running up the Linux 6.10 release went. In the end, though, “it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc [release candidate].” So, here we are with the latest Linux kernel ready for work. This mid-year 2024 kernel upgrade brings a host of exciting features and improvements that enhance performance, security, and hardware support across various platforms.
Demos: Deploying LLMs With WasmEdge
SEATTLE — Among the benefits of WebAssembly: it offers great promise as a runtime for large language models, due to its portability. WebAssembly (or Wasm, to its friends) allows developers to write code on any platform, in the language of their choice, without the need for recompilation. “Wasm is — you can think of it as the Java bytecode,” said Miley Fu, devrel and founding member of Second State, in this episode of The New Stack Makers.
Automating Context in Structured Data for LLMs
With the growth of machine learning and generative AI, users are learning they can’t just throw a bunch of data into a model and expect anything close to reliable results. The missing element: context. Structured data in particular can be useless in large language models without some knowledge of the consistent definition of the words, how they are used in a particular context and the relationships between data.
Zed Ported Its Text Editor to Linux and It's Pretty Special
If you’re a programmer or a Linux admin who really appreciates a good text editor, you’re going to want to learn about Zed. According to the Zed website, the goal was to build the world’s best text editor. That’s a fairly tall order, especially given how everyone who uses a text editor either has their favorite or knows exactly what makes for a great tool. What Sets Zed Apart So, what makes Zed so special?
How Amazon Matches Power Needs to Green Energy Sources
Last week, Amazon announced it had already met its 100% renewable energy goals — seven years early. The green news from the world’s single largest retailer was rosier than its cloud computing peers. In early July Google had reported its overall emissions in 2023 grew 13%, blaming AI’s increasing demands for power. Microsoft also reported an overall increase of 29%, which they said was mostly due to the construction of new data centers.
Devs Need System Design Tools, Not Diagramming Tools
Devs Need System Design Tools, Not Diagramming Tools contributed, Image by Jan from Pixabay. When engineering teams select tools for managing their software systems, particularly for design and visualization, they often encounter the XY problem. The XY problem arises when someone attempts to solve problem X using solution Y but faces challenges.
How JS Meta-Framework SolidStart Became Router Agnostic
If there’s one thing Ryan Carniato, creator of SolidJS, did not want, it was to be too opinionated with SolidStart, the meta-framework he built and released last month. For instance, why should meta-frameworks tell developers which router to use? And yet, they do: JavaScript frameworks are typically tightly restricted by and tied to a specific application router.
AI-Assisted Coding: A Double-Edged Sword for Security
PARIS — Developers on a wide scale are using and creating AI models and large language models (LLMs), as these facilities offer both the creation of code and the development of applications for LLMs. The popularity of LLMs has exploded, but despite the enthusiasm, the security issues resulting from this rapid advancement remain unsolved, not fully understood, and ultimately overlooked.
Linux: How File Permissions Work
This article on services fits into a larger series of Linux articles covering various sysadmin topics, including hardware identification and managing system processes. You can build a lab environment by following the information in the Linux: Companion Lab for Linux Skill Blocks Repository article. In this series, we also covered how to pick a distribution, how the Linux kernel interacts with hardware and how Linux manages system services, storage and user and group permissions.
Linux: Understand sudo to Rule Your Server
You’ve probably seen the XKCD cartoon wherein one person asks another to make them a sandwich. When the second person refuses, the first responds with, “sudo make me a sandwich.” Of course, any Linux user would smirk at the idea, knowing the second person would then have no choice but to make the sandwich. Why? Because… sudo! Sudo stands for super user do and is the equivalent of the Windows run as command. Let me give you a bit of background.
Linux: File Management
This article on services fits into a larger series of Linux articles covering various sysadmin topics, including hardware identification and managing system processes. You can build a lab environment by following the information in the Linux: Companion Lab for Linux Skill Blocks Repository article. In this series, we also covered how to pick a distribution, how the Linux kernel interacts with hardware and how Linux manages system services, storage, and user and group permissions.
What’s the Impact of Platform Engineering?
When Vilas Veeraraghavan was director of engineering at Walmart Labs, a big challenge the retailing giant grappled with was how its developers took a variety of paths to deliver their code. “We had too many areas, too many businesses that had goals in mind for themselves,” he said during an online panel at PlatformCon 2024, the virtual event held in June.
Introduction to MoonBit, a New Language Toolchain for Wasm
WebAssembly (Wasm) combines the efficiency inherent in low-level code programming with the ease of component transportability typically found in Linux containers. In some respects, it competes with Docker. However, intensive work within a browser heavily suggests a future in AI. As it happens, other languages don’t necessarily compile efficiently to Wasm, which somewhat undoes the advantage of having a program that can run in the browser.
Linux: Synchronize Local and Remote Directories With Rsync
If you manage multiple Linux servers, you might find yourself in a situation where you have two machines with directories that need to remain in sync with one another. This can be used as a backup solution or maybe you have different servers assigned to different users but have that one directory housing data for which all users need to have access. There are several use cases for such a setup and one tool to make setting it up quite simple. That tool is rsync.
Introducing the Z.Js Framework and Mesop, a Python Framework
The Z.Js meta framework takes a less-is-more approach to development, creator Hussein Kizz said this week. “So after months of work and learning, the Z.Js framework is the fruit of the efforts to make a more straightforward, step-less Js framework that trades all the shiny stuff for simplicity and low mental overhead on developers,” Kizz wrote. “Are you tired of having to learn and always play catch-up on new framework features just to make a simple app?
Platform Engineering Is for Everyone
Platform engineering, which centralizes best practices and components for development teams, is gaining prominence as DevSecOps practices and frameworks become increasingly embedded across organizations. Platform engineering aims to normalize and standardize developer workflows by providing developers with optimized “golden paths” for most of their workloads and flexibility to define exceptions for the rest.
Apple’s Open Source Roots: The BSD Heritage Behind macOS and iOS
Apple’s Open Source Roots: The BSD Heritage Behind macOS and iOS contributed, Image by Colin Behrens from Pixabay. Consider this: Apple’s stylish and user-friendly devices, like the powerful MacBook and the ubiquitous iPhone, owe much of their reliability and performance to an open source operating system. But which open source OS do they use?
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