Arjun Iyer is CEO and co-founder of Signadot, a Kubernetes-native platform that lets developers and coding agents test code changes against real environments.

Arjun joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to argue that code validation has to happen before the merge, now that coding agents are writing much of the code. They cover why "merge is a contract," why mocks and unit tests aren't enough on their own, and why the PR has replaced the developer as the unit to govern. Arjun closes on where humans still belong once agents are writing and testing the code. Read more from Arjun here.

Naveen Puvvula started as an embedded mobile engineer and spent years shipping products across a string of startups before running infrastructure and platform tooling as a director at Life360. He recently made a move a lot of senior leaders are weighing: he stepped back into an individual-contributor seat, joining construction-scheduling startup Planera as a senior principal engineer.

Naveen joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to argue that the hard limits on AI in engineering are organizational: structure, judgment, and trust. They get into why human judgment is moving to the front of the lifecycle, the shift from SDLC to PDLC, and what happens to specialization as agents take on more. Naveen closes on the accountability framework vertical AI will need once it reaches the physical world, and his advice for leaders weighing the same leap back to an IC role.

Adam Berman spent two years as VP of Engineering at Semgrep before stepping back into an IC role this past February. He came up through product engineering and loves building alongside customers on a fast feedback loop. He'd stepped into the VP role to help Semgrep scale, then felt the itch to get back to building and tackling greenfield, open-ended problems directly.

Adam joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to work through what changes for security when agents write most of the code. They discuss why static analysis is having a moment, the argument for shifting security both left into the agent and right into continuous review, and why the next wave of exploits won't be a new kind of bug.

Steve Flanders is a Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk, now part of Cisco, where he oversees the Splunk Observability Cloud platform. He has spent nearly two decades in observability and was a founding member of OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry, helping build the service that became the OpenTelemetry Collector. He wrote the book on it, literally: Mastering OpenTelemetry and Observability. He's now also leading AI transformation for his business unit, which he digs into during the episode.

Steve joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to trace where the real constraints in software delivery are moving now that AI writes more of the code. They get into why review and rework break first, why "garbage in, garbage out" now governs observability, and how to instrument for a world where an agent, not a human, is querying your telemetry. Steve closes with his advice for teams under pressure to just ship: fix one thing at a time.

Abby Bangser is a Principal Engineer at Syntasso, working on Kratix, the open-source framework for building platforms, and its enterprise version, Syntasso Kratix Enterprise. Outside Syntasso she stays close to the community side of the field: she's a CNCF ambassador, a former lead of the CNCF platforms working group, a co-chair of recent KubeCons in Europe and North America, and a Team Topologies advocate.

Abby joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to discuss what a platform actually is: the layer that encodes your business onto your infrastructure, exposed through an API that lets the team behind it change how things work without forcing every other team to change with them. They cover why skills are "markdowns that say pretty please," the producer-versus-consumer marketplace model for platform engineering, and why template-driven infrastructure is the "puppy for Christmas" anti-pattern.

Martin Nettling, Ph.D., is a Senior Director of Engineering at Tealium, where he also runs QA. He came up through bioinformatics and molecular genetics before moving into computer science and software development. Martin was VP of Engineering at Datameer before joining Tealium two years ago. He brought six or seven engineers with him, which meant grafting an established team and its own way of working onto a worldwide company with teams in Poland and the US. That experience of building trust across cultures runs straight into the topic of this episode.

Martin joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to separate two ideas most teams lump together. Confidence is for tools, trust is for people, and treating an AI-generated PR as a referendum on the engineer who wrote it gets both wrong. They get into the "augmented author model" (whoever uses AI owns how its output is communicated), the "unbroken why" that lets you trace a log line back to company strategy, why throwing every kind of code into one review bucket is a mistake, and how risk labels bubbling up into a traffic-light system let teams stop reviewing everything. Martin closes on the part of the system he trusts least, and it isn't the model. Read more from Dr. Nettling on trust and confidence here.