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Ganesh Datta on why every team still has a finite budget, now it's tokens instead of headcount. $500 to spend: ship the feature or fix the P2? The orgs building a framework for that call now will have it a lot easier when the CFO puts a cap on spend. From Braintrust by Cortex. Full episode out next Thursday.

Give a model permission to act on your computer and you're trusting it will behave the way you expect. It might not. In this clip from our Braintrust conversation, Adam Berman, engineering leader at Semgrep, breaks down why a backdoored model is a different threat model than backdoored software. You can't fuzz-test your way to finding it, and you often can't detect it until it's already acting the way it shouldn't.

Solution Architect Jeff Schnitter walks through arrays of primitives in Workflow User Inputs, turning an object you have to transform into an array you can pass straight through. What it does.

Adam Berman, VP of Engineering at Semgrep, on the double edge of AI tools for engineering leaders: they compress the distance between an idea and a working prototype, letting him get from exploration to a demoable POC in the gaps between meetings. But that same leverage amplifies risk. One person can spin up 1,000 unowned problems just as fast as they can spin up 1,000 wins. From a Braintrust by Cortex conversation on how AI is changing the job of engineering leadership.

This week's Feature Friday: Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through KPI cards, a new way to build custom dashboards in Engineering Intelligence. KPI cards pull key metrics, like change failure rate and rollback frequency, into compact tiles so they stay visible without taking up chart space. That means the metric you're actively working, incidents, in this demo, gets full-size room, without losing sight of the rest of your system.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Steve Flanders, who leads AI transformation at Splunk and wrote the book on OpenTelemetry, to talk about why AI acceleration without strong observability foundations creates more problems than it solves.

Steve Flanders (Senior Director of Engineering, Splunk) makes the case that AI can't save an observability stack that never agreed on a standard. Mix formats across metrics and logs, and AI stops correlating and starts guessing, which means you either make the wrong call or miss the answer you actually needed. OpenTelemetry is one fix, but Prometheus and Fluentd work too. The standard matters more than which one you pick.

OpenTelemetry instrumentation used to mean hours of manual work, wiring up metrics service by service. Now you can just ask for it. Tell an AI agent what you're trying to observe, something like "add OpenTelemetry so I can track this application's performance," and it turns that into an intent specification, then enriches your existing code with instrumentation to match. OpenTelemetry is open source and on GitHub. Pairing it with an AI agent that actually understands your codebase is what turns "add some metrics" into instrumentation that's useful.

Search in Catalog used to mean typing an exact name and hoping. Lead Platform Engineer Keith Zeto walks through the rebuild for this Feature Friday.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Abby Bangser, a platform engineering leader at Syntasso and former lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to talk about why AI agents need real platform APIs, not raw cloud credentials.