The MonkCast

Recorded live at Cloudflare Connect 2026 in San Francisco, RedMonk’s Kate Holterhoff and James Governor sit down with Rita Kozlov, Cloudflare’s VP of Developers and AI, as Workers turns ten. Rita traces how the platform began, from custom edge code written for enterprise customers to a sandboxed runtime built on isolates with no cold starts. She also explains how Cloudflare decides which primitives to build without simply rebuilding AWS. The conversation then turns to the agentic internet. Agents now generate more than half of web traffic, so what changes for identity, content compensation, payments, and discoverability through AEO? Rita also covers the acquisitions of Astro, Deno, and VoidZero, and Cloudflare’s responsibility as an open source steward. Other topics include Cloudflare’s first models, the vinext “slop fork” of Next.js, the future of Durable Objects and self-hosting, why Git and CI/CD are straining under agent-driven velocity, and why Cloudflare is the real neocloud.

This RedMonk video is sponsored by Cloudflare.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/rita-kozlov/

Chapters

1:12 Workers turns ten and Rita’s background
3:44 How Workers was born: the 10-year overnight success
7:03 Isolates, sandboxes, and choosing primitives
10:16 AWS, Vercel, and the rivalry question
12:39 Never say never: the free tier, R2, and entering new markets
16:19 The agentic internet: agents now outnumber humans
22:23 Agent identity and delegation
24:40 Who pays? Content creators, compensation, and AEO
30:35 “Where are my Workers?” Agent-first developer experience
32:37 Acquiring Astro, Deno, and VoidZero
35:16 Favorite launch: Cloudflare’s first models
38:00 The vinext “slop fork” of Next.js
41:05 Connect sessions and the Lovable demo
45:00 The future of Durable Objects and self-hosting
48:22 Git, CI/CD, and Artifacts for agents
53:27 Call to action: how is your cloud serving you?
55:10 Neoclouds and wrap-up

On this RedMonk conversation, Vlad Miricioiu, Director of the Software Stewardship Lab, chats with Kate Holterhoff about improving open source sustainability, security, and supporting maintainers through innovative funding models. In addition to sharing the Software Stewardship Lab's mission, Miricioiu discusses supply chain issues, mental health challenges, and the importance of open collaboration.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/vlad-miricioiu/

Chapters
00:04 Introduction to Open Source Stewardship
02:59 The Open Source Pledge and Its Impact
06:04 The Mission of the Software Stewardship Lab
08:53 Funding Models for Open Source Maintainers
12:00 Challenges Faced by Open Source Maintainers
14:57 The Role of Companies in Supporting Open Source
17:37 Security in Open Source Software
20:32 The Future of Open Source Collaboration
24:34 Navigating Conflicts of Interest in Open Source
29:25 The Role of Funding and Grants in Open Source
35:17 AI and Burnout: The Impact on Open Source Maintainers
40:07 Understanding 'Bernies': The Challenge of Unmaintained Projects
45:07 Building Partnerships for Open Source Sustainability

In this episode of the MonkCast, James Governor sits down with Sanjay Sarathy, SVP of Developer Experience at Cloudinary, to discuss developer trust, and why it still matters in the agentic software development era. With more than four million developers signed up, and 40% of new registrations now coming from agents, Cloudinary is rethinking what trust means, but maintaining true to its core values. Sanjay walks through the principles guiding that work: products that work as promised every time, human support that scales, accuracy in AI-assisted answers, transparency, long-term API stability, keeping the developer voice in the product loop, and investing in education for students and early-career developers.

The RedMonk video is sponsored by Cloudinary.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/sanjay-sarathy/

Chapters
00:07 Introduction to trust in developer platforms
00:51 Why trust is crucial in a rapidly changing environment
02:05 Cloudinary's longstanding focus on trust
04:50 Principle 1: Consistency in product performance
08:40 Scaling support for millions of developers
12:58 Ensuring AI-assisted accuracy and trust
17:40 Transparency as a trust foundation
21:02 Long-term API commitment and stability
24:42 Listening to the developer voice
28:58 Supporting developer education and growth
34:18 Summary and closing thoughts

In this RedMonk Conversation, Anne Bertucio de Hollembeak, COO of ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) , chats with Kate Holterhoff about the importance of open source tools in trust and safety, especially in the age of AI. She shares insights on building safety tools, the role of open source, and how these efforts can create a safer online environment for everyone.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/anne-bertucio-de-hollembeak/

Chapters

00:04 Introduction to Roost and Ambertuccio's Background

02:53 Understanding Trust and Safety in Online Spaces

05:44 The Role of Open Source in Trust and Safety

08:43 Child Safety Tools and Their Impact

11:29 Mila's Suicide Prevention Guardrail Project

14:21 AI Contributions and Community Engagement

17:20 Maintainer Burnout and AI Slop Management

26:13 Introduction to Bug Bounty and Security Processes

26:57 Understanding Osprey: The Tool for Safety and Investigation

28:18 The Story Behind Osprey and Its Origins

30:22 Roost: A Nonprofit Approach to Open Source Safety

32:04 Partnerships and Collaborations in the Safety Space

33:46 Blue Sky: A Case Study in Collaboration

35:21 Challenges in Decentralized Safety Solutions

37:14 Addressing the Bot Issue and AI Challenges

43:47 Open Source Policies and Their Implications

45:49 Conclusion and Resources for Further Engagement

Why do some teams see massive speedups from AI coding agents while others barely notice a difference? In this RedMonk New Builders Conversation with AWS, Kate Holterhoff talks with Liam Greenamyre, Principal PM of Developer Platforms at AWS, about the uneven impact of AI on software development and how to restructure work so agents can succeed. Liam explains why making tasks verifiable is the single biggest lever, then walks through the Agent Toolkit for AWS: a remote MCP server, 100+ skills, plugins, and a rules file that work with Claude Code, Codex, Kiro, and more. They dig into how a single RunScript tool covers 15,000+ AWS APIs token-efficiently, how IAM context keys separate human and agent actions, how agents discover new services like Aurora DSQL, and why isolated dev accounts make safe sandboxes for autonomous agents. Liam closes with a bold prediction: the biggest changes ahead are organizational, not technological.

This New Builders conversation is sponsored by AWS.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/liam-greenamyre/

Chapters
00:04 Introduction to AI in Software Development
03:07 The Uneven Adoption of AI in Development Teams
06:20 Strategies for Successful AI Integration
10:09 Exploring the AWS Agent Toolkit
17:01 Guardrails and Context for AI Agents
20:10 The Impact of AI on FinOps and Cost Management
24:28 Evolution of Agent Tooling
32:17 Enhancing Discoverability in AWS
35:56 Guardrails and Safety in AWS Operations
41:03 Future of AI in Software Development

Most of an enterprise application stack is open source that nobody is paid to maintain. Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat puts it at 60 to 70 percent, and that gap is what IBM's Lightwell is built for. He walks James Governor through the mechanics: members scan and triage their own dependencies, submit what they find with the source identity stripped out, and get fixes back after an embargo period before those fixes reach a wider network and, where a maintainer still exists, the upstream project. Financial services goes first. Hellekson is candid that plenty of customers cannot use the service yet, because joining would only lengthen a patch backlog already measured in months. Mythos, the two agree, mostly revealed how bad things already were. They also work through token economics, why nobody needs to scan OpenSSL separately, and why a fix should end up as deterministic code rather than something an AI keeps rediscovering.

Red Hat is a RedMonk client, but this is free and independent content.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/gunnar-hellekson/

Chapters
00:00 Introduction: IBM's big bet on open source security
03:18 A win-win for customers and the open source community
05:27 The problem: 60–70% of the stack is unsupported open source
07:15 Carry your own fork or hope upstream fixes it
09:17 Eat your vegetables first: hardened images and paid platforms
09:45 How Lightwell works
11:57 Scope: application dependencies
12:57 Network effects, industry clearinghouses, and identity washing
14:34 When to move off orphaned projects
16:04 Mythos showed how bad things already were
19:51 Delivery via Maven, PyPI, and npm
20:33 Attackers vs. defenders at machine speed
21:44 Why fixes should be deterministic code, not endless AI
23:06 Token economics and shared remediation
24:05 Nobody needs to scan OpenSSL separately
25:08 Will every enterprise build its own software?
27:38 Wrap-up

In this RedMonk conversation, Pankaj Gupta, Senior Director of Product Marketing, VCF Division, at Broadcom, chats Platform Engineering in the AI era with Stephen O'Grady. Gupta explains that more than 90% of organizations run an internal platform, but despite widespread adoption, Gupta thinks most platforms are hitting two ceilings. They were built, in his phrase, "AI blind," and they were built for exactly one user, the developer. AI has already moved the bottleneck from writing code to getting it into production, and the user base is about to change shape.  Also in this episode: when golden paths harden into golden cages, why FinOps and security can no longer be bolted on, and Gupta's five pillars for platform engineering 2.0.

The RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Broadcom.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/pankaj-gupta/

Chapters

00:04 Introduction to Sponsorships

00:08 Introduction to Platform Engineering

02:52 Current State and Challenges of Platform Engineering

05:47 The Evolution of Platform Engineering

08:33 AI's Impact on Platform Engineering

11:23 The Rise of Agent Personas

14:52 Five Pillars of Modern Platform Engineering

17:47 Next Steps for Platform Engineers

In this episode, David Pollak, founder and CEO of Spice Labs, and Allan Friedman, Senior Technical Advisor at the Institute for Security and Technology, discuss the importance of software supply chain security, bills of materials, and the emerging field of post-quantum cryptography with Kate Holterhoff. Friedman, "the godfather of SBOMs," gives a state of play for 2026: where the tooling has matured, where it still falls short, and why the Cyber Resilience Act is about to make this everybody's problem. From there the conversation moves to CBOMs and post-quantum cryptography. Pollak argues PQC stopped being a 2035 problem in June, when the White House, the US military and French standards bodies all pulled their deadlines forward by five years. Also covered: whether developers should have to think about security at all, what the IPv6 transition taught us, and the 360,000 Maven packages carrying vulnerable code nobody disclosed.

This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Spice Labs.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/david-pollak-allan-friedman/

Chapters

00:04 Introduction to the Guests and Topics

06:29 The State of SBOMs in 2026

13:46 Understanding Cryptographic Bills of Materials

22:12 The Intersection of Security and Development

31:25 The CBOM Approach and Its Importance

33:23 Post-Quantum Cryptography: A Future Concern?

38:55 Navigating Regulations and Compliance

43:57 Finding vs. Fixing Vulnerabilities in Open Source

49:58 AI's Role in Security and Vulnerability Management

53:31 Lessons from IPv6 and Cryptography Libraries

Kate Holterhoff talks with Victoria Melnikova, head of new business at Evil Martians, about what product market fit looks like for developer tools in 2026. Drawing on research by Evil Martians CEO Irina Nazarova, Melnikova argues PMF is a spectrum, not a switch. Product signals and revenue signals are separate things, and the gap between them tells you where to focus. Her advice to most early stage founders? Your product is probably fine, go do sales. Their conversation covers why dev tools resist the golden path metrics of generic SaaS (what's the golden path in Photoshop?), why agent experience (AX) matters now that LLMs increasingly pick tools for their users, and why engineers who use AI well are becoming the hires companies fight over. Also: a corrupted video shoot, agencies as pirate ships, and why AI should be like a good wig.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/victoria-melnikova/

Chapters
00:04 Introduction to Dev Tools and Product Market Fit
10:52 Understanding Product Market Fit in DevTools
18:19 The Shifting Landscape of DevTools and AI
25:33 Agent Experience and Its Impact on DevTools
28:54 Navigating Agent Experience and AI Integration
34:17 The Future of Hiring in Tech
38:58 Designing with AI: Balancing Human Touch and Automation
47:09 Security in Open Source and AI

Generated code is arriving faster than maintainers can read it. RedMonk's Steve O'Grady discusses this new reality with Jason Brooks and Brian Proffitt, both managers in Red Hat's Open Source and AI Program Office. Proffitt's teams are adding what he calls human speed bumps upstream: PR templates that ask whether AI wrote the patch, and if so, what the prompt was. The point is transparency, not blocking the flow. Brooks argues for the importance of human decision makers because writing code may cost close to nothing now, but getting another person to accept it still costs plenty, and someone always pays the token bill. The conversation also touches on maintainer burnout, why saying "no" is still a legitimate answer to a pull request, Fedora Hummingbird and its agentically assembled packages, and the thing Proffitt worries about most: trust.

This RedMonk video is sponsored by Red Hat.

Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/brian-proffitt-jason-brooks/

Chapters

00:04 Introduction to AI and Open Source Governance

00:32 Guest Introductions: Jason Brooks and Brian Proffitt

02:10 AI's Ubiquity and Industry Impact

03:06 Guardrails for AI Code Quality in Projects

04:22 Implementing Human Speed Bumps for AI Contributions

05:17 Encouraging Transparency in AI Contributions

06:46 Automated Review and Guardrails in Open Source

07:50 Verifying AI-Generated Code in Fedora

09:10 Human Oversight in AI Processes

13:39 Developer Burnout and Managing Contribution Floods

16:09 Trust and Transparency in AI-Driven Ecosystems

18:30 Evolving Policies for AI in Fedora

20:16 Future Challenges and Community Trust in AI

21:11 Closing Remarks and Future Outlook