# Why the traditional pull request has a target on its back | CircleCI’s Rob Zuber | Dev Interrupted Powered by LinearB

> CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber joins the show to discuss why the traditional pull request is struggling under the sheer volume of autonomous AI agents. As AI adoption forces engineering teams to completely reimagine the software development lifecycle, code review is shifting toward an accountability-oriented model while CI/CD validation moves directly into agentic workflows.

_This is a markdown rendering of a live HTML page on linearb.io, generated for AI/LLM consumption — it is not a markdown-only site. To get the full HTML page instead, request this URL with an explicit `Accept: text/html` header (no wildcard, no markdown preference)._

[Podcast](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcasts)

/

Why the traditional pull request has a target on its back | CircleCI’s Rob Zuber

# Why the traditional pull request has a target on its back | CircleCI’s Rob Zuber

By Rob Zuber

|

July 28, 2026

![Blog_Comprehensive_DORA_Guide_2400x1256_70_8130b5ade1](https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/c_limit,w_2560/f_auto/q_auto/v1/Blog_Comprehensive_DORA_Guide_2400x1256_70_8130b5ade1?_a=BAVMn6ID0)

The traditional pull request was built for human eyes, but in an era of autonomous AI agents, it officially has a massive target on its back. This week on Dev Interrupted, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber joins Andrew to discuss why the rapid pace of AI adoption is forcing engineering teams to completely reimagine the software development lifecycle. They explore the shift toward an accountability-oriented model for code review, how CI/CD validation is moving directly into the local agent loop, and the very real financial dangers of unchecked token budgets. Finally, Rob shares his playbook for leading organizations through this chaotic transition without burning out your developers (or your token budget). We recommend pairing his strategy with something like AI code review to find the floor for your newly-agentic engineering org’s output.

### Show Notes

* CircleCI:Explore the leading continuous integration and delivery platform at[circleci.com](https://circleci.com/).
* The Confident Commit:Subscribe to Rob's newsletter and podcast for data-backed software delivery insights on[CircleCI's website](https://www2.circleci.com/newsletter).
* The Confident Commit Podcast:Listen to[Rob’s podcast](https://circleci.com/podcast/confident-commit/).
* State of Software Delivery:Read[CircleCI's annual report](https://circleci.com/resources/2026-state-of-software-delivery/)analyzing millions of CI workflows to benchmark your team's performance.
* Gather.dev:Apply to join the curated, invite-only community for senior engineering leaders at[gather.dev](https://www.gather.dev/).
* Follow Rob:[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robzuber)

### Transcript 

_(Disclaimer: may contain unintentionally confusing, inaccurate and/or amusing transcription errors)_

\[00:00:00\] **Andrew Zigler:** I've, haven't seen a soccer game in a really long time, so now I'm thinking like I need to even... Or actually, you know what, what's really funny is that I live in a neighborhood with a lot of bars, and these are bars that never play sports on them, but now they're all suddenly sports bars.

\[00:00:15\] **Andrew Zigler:** You walk by, like, every th- anything with a TV, actually. I was picking up a salad the other day, and the place where I get my salad, all of the TVs in the, in the restaurant and in the back, in, like, the kitchen I guess too, had all been commandeered by the people working, and it was all playing game. It was really kinda inescapable.

\[00:00:32\] **Andrew Zigler:** I love kinda, I love the cultural phenomenon of that. Like, no one wants to miss a single second of it, and it's, like, constantly going.

\[00:00:40\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like, I, I think if you were a business right now, that's what people are going out to look for too, right? So you wanna make sure that you're, you

\[00:00:50\] **Andrew Zigler:** a

\[00:00:50\] **Rob Zuber:** you're part of it. And plus it's like, yeah, and, and for the most part, like it's, it's an emotional rollercoaster, but a lot of joy, right?

\[00:00:56\] **Rob Zuber:** Like, people are excited to be \[00:01:00\] here, this community, a lot of things that build up around it. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's cool

\[00:01:04\] **Andrew Zigler:** no one knows how it's gonna turn out. Everyone's like

\[00:01:06\] **Rob Zuber:** Right

\[00:01:07\] **Andrew Zigler:** on the edge of their seats. And, you know, speaking of not knowing how things are gonna turn out, I feel like the world of engineering that we live in has been a rollercoaster, especially for the

\[00:01:18\] **Rob Zuber:** It,

\[00:01:18\] **Andrew Zigler:** years

\[00:01:19\] **Rob Zuber:** yeah, it is, uh, there are a lot of open questions, but similarly like a fun ride. I mean, for a subset of people maybe, I'm not sure. But if you, if you like discovery, if you like new ways of doing things, if you're sort of like a engineer's engineer, if you will, like if you, if you wanna take things apart and see how they work, like there's a whole lot of new stuff to take apart and figure out and, and try to maximize.

\[00:01:50\] **Rob Zuber:** And so, so yeah, it's, uh, it can be unnerving for sure, but also, also very fun

\[00:01:57\] **Andrew Zigler:** It's never been such an exciting time to be a \[00:02:00\] very curious person, to just wanna know how things work and to like what you're, you said, you know, take them apart, figure thing out how things work now. Um,

\[00:02:09\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah

\[00:02:10\] **Andrew Zigler:** an exciting opportunity. Maybe not everybody has necessarily the appetite to wanna bite into that big mystery, but the folks that do, I know that they're just like, it's an exciting time, especially, yeah, for us here too, you know, here at Dev Interrupted and at LinearB. Um, I just feel like there's so many new developments for how people are even just working day to day that are exciting on a week to week basis. Um, I'm constantly throwing away, um, old things and picking up new stuff and it can get kind of exhausting after a while, you know?

\[00:02:38\] **Rob Zuber:** Right. Yeah, that's, that's the trick is sometimes you just want to get something done and we're like spending so much time discovering how to do things. Although on the flip side of that, as I like caught myself saying it, I feel like the job of engineering right now is building the, the tools that build things more than it is building the things, \[00:03:00\] right?

\[00:03:00\] **Rob Zuber:** Like that's the big shift that we're making. And so again, if you're sort of super curious and y- your goal is to get value to customers, like your approach to that has changed, but that's exciting and novel and new. But it can be tiring. Like there's so many new things to try and so many of them will be unhelpful, honestly.

\[00:03:20\] **Rob Zuber:** But like they're all so new that you're not really sure and there's not clarity about what you should try. And so it can be, you know, it's like a- addictive maybe. There's certainly some addictive patterns that we're seeing in people, you know, trying some of these things and so, so it can be exhausting.

\[00:03:36\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, and you know, you feel like you're in a race against everyone else in the industry. Like there's a, there's a lot going on that I th- I just personally, I feel like I have to check in every once in a while and be like, "Am I, am I loving this right now or am I pushing myself way too hard?" You know, like maybe I just need a, a break.

\[00:03:53\] **Rob Zuber:** Maybe I need to just watch something or go out with some friends for a minute and just, you know, step away. \[00:04:00\] Um,

\[00:04:00\] **Andrew Zigler:** can be

\[00:04:00\] **Rob Zuber:** but yeah, s-

\[00:04:01\] **Andrew Zigler:** too when you get pinged on your phone and your agent's letting you know that it has a question. It can be hard to escape and turn it over at the end of the day, especially then when you get

\[00:04:09\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah.

\[00:04:10\] **Andrew Zigler:** for using tokens outside of normal usage windows. The whole thing has definitely been gamified up and down to an extent.

\[00:04:16\] **Andrew Zigler:** And actually here on this show, we recently participated, uh, in some research with researchers, um, in Europe. We're currently working on a research paper about exactly this, like the dark flow in vibe coding and comparing folks', uh, reactions to how they feel about the work they're doing compared to, like, their actual outputs. It's kinda like a version of the meter study that we've all been talking about, but more specifically looking at, like, the psychology on a developer level. Uh, but ultimately, you're so right that the name of the game has evolved. Uh, instead of directly engineering the end solution, we are creating an environment that influences that product coming into \[00:05:00\] reality, and that's like a whole new level of working this stuff into.

\[00:05:03\] **Andrew Zigler:** It's like overnight everyone is suddenly uncomfortably a manager of something within their domain. Um, and there's a lot of learning to be done, like you said. So I'm, I'm really excited to dig in. And to those listening as well, I just wanted to start by introducing Rob Zubere, the Cir- the CTO CircleCI.

\[00:05:23\] **Andrew Zigler:** Now, Rob is basically, uh, like one of the main protagonists of the Dev Interrupted universe, if I were to say so. He's, he's been on the show a n- a number of times, but also worked with us on, in, on like a regular cadence to talk about how, um, engineering is getting impacted by AI, how it's really just getting, like, garbled up, just chewed up and spit back out, and it looks totally different. Um, and I personally always think that Rob is way ahead in terms of the thinking around this stuff. Like, for example, when I first met Rob back in 2024 at an event we had in San Francisco, you know, he posed a question to the audience. He \[00:06:00\] said, "Why are we writing in a programming language designed for humans?"

\[00:06:04\] **Andrew Zigler:** And that really stuck with me. That was back in 2024\. And now looking at where things are moving in our industry and how fast they're going, it feels like that future is just right around the corner. So Rob, it's really great to have you back to dive into the latest state of things, uh, and to see where your head's at on this kind of stuff.

\[00:06:22\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah, super excited to be back. Thanks for having me. And, um, it's funny that you bring that up, like that was a big thing that was on my mind back then, and I've like totally changed my opinion, but also still reflect on that opinion. You know what I mean? Like, so I, I measure most of my learning and development in days or weeks at this point.

\[00:06:43\] **Rob Zuber:** So when you talk about a couple years ago, I, I do remember that event. Uh, it was super fun. Um, but, uh, yeah. Wow. And it seems it's gonna be hard to like try to map like two years, right? And I, I've been at Circle CI coming up \[00:07:00\] on 12 years, I think. And so it, it, it all f- it all feels very linear until the last couple years where just like everything, you know, started changing so quickly and, um, again, as we've been saying, just like for me, that's super interesting and exciting and I love learning this stuff, um, and exploring new opportunities.

\[00:07:22\] **Rob Zuber:** But at the same time, yeah, trying to remember what I was thinking about two years ago is super... Well, it'll be fun. Let's dive in.

\[00:07:27\] **Andrew Zigler:** know w- when we pulled that out of the archives, it's like, wow, just how well this ques- question has aged, but also too just, like, how many questions have now formed between now and then that are still unanswered, that we're still answering. Um, you know, one of them being there, there's just been re- this really funny phenomenon in engineering, especially in the last few years around declaring everything dead.

\[00:07:47\] **Andrew Zigler:** You know, like MCP is dead or, you know, so and so is dead. This is like a, a thing we love to do. Um, I get blamed about it all the time as, quote, a tech influencer in the media of dragging these protocols way out to pasture too \[00:08:00\] early and then

\[00:08:01\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah

\[00:08:01\] **Andrew Zigler:** ultimately finding their fit later on. So, um, you know, the, in the, your world right now, what feels dead to you?

\[00:08:08\] **Andrew Zigler:** What's new? Um, are there things in your world that the Internet's claiming is dead that you're like, "That's so wrong. It's not"? Just curious where your head's at.

\[00:08:16\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah, I-- It's, it's a really fascinating exploration. Like, I think I-I-I've heard that CI/CD is dead. Um, our business numbers disagree, I would say. Like, w- you know, we're, we're trying to help people deliver high-quality software quickly to their customers, and that goal is not dead. So the shape will change, but the idea that CI/CD is dead, I mean, is we may come out of this with a very different look of how we, um, how we do that work.

\[00:08:50\] **Rob Zuber:** But like I said, like we're-- everybody's doing more of it is what, what I'm seeing. Um, one thing that I like to, I wouldn't say proclaim \[00:09:00\] dead, but I would say has a target on its back, is the pull request. Um, because that sort of as, as a form factor, right? Like the idea that I'm gonna get my agent to use an, a CLI to create a web page, 'cause calling a PR is basically a web page that humans are meant to interact on, right?

\[00:09:23\] **Rob Zuber:** I mean, I know that you can interact with them p- so that someone else's agent can use an API to go get the state of that change and write some comments on it so that the original agent or yet another agent can come along and try to react to those comments. Like, it's a very weird place as a, as an interaction point.

\[00:09:43\] **Rob Zuber:** Like, it doesn't make sense in the world that we're trying to transition into. And sort of, you know, if you go back to that question about human-oriented programming languages, right? It makes sense for a minute in a transitional state where the only i- like we n- we want \[00:10:00\] human inspection to make sure the machines are behaving correctly.

\[00:10:04\] **Rob Zuber:** But humans were never great at reviewing code to begin with, right? Pick a PR and give it to the same person on two different days. Give it to the same person at two different times of day based on whether they just ate or just had coffee. You know, like are they in the post-lunch kinda coma or are they super fired up with a ton of energy?

\[00:10:27\] **Rob Zuber:** Are they really interested or do they have five minutes before they have to run to the bus, you know? And like the quality of that feedback is gonna vary so much. And so the, that model always felt a little bit broken. We just didn't feel particularly compelled to do something about it. But now, as, you know, we talk more and more about, um, shifting bottlenecks in the SDLC and reimagining the whole SDLC, I really think that we will figure out how to do, you know, code review, code merging in a way that doesn't \[00:11:00\] really involve a human.

\[00:11:01\] **Rob Zuber:** And when that happens, or some tiny fraction of it needs a human, whatever that might be, when that happens, I think that interface is gonna feel really clunky to make it happen.

\[00:11:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** I completely agree about the pull request definitely feeling like a relic of a time where it served a purpose, but now almost the pull request is more like a stage than like an office where like the work is happening or people are interacting. A lot of times now the pull request is like, it's a statement of record where a bunch of systems come in and put their stamps on it, good or bad.

\[00:11:38\] **Andrew Zigler:** Maybe a human's looking at it these days. Our numbers say they're not. You dove into those numbers too on our recent, you know, benchmarks report that we had. And so, like you're familiar with how very little human attention's able to get put on the amount of generated code and what goes through, um, the gates that we have.

\[00:11:55\] **Andrew Zigler:** And so, um, the PR starts to feel a little performative, \[00:12:00\] you know, at that kind of velocity, at that level of detail. It's also not useful because if I come in and maybe I don't like your PR or your PR's too big or there's ways that we need to change this, the olden days, you'd go and change some lines in that PR.

\[00:12:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** Now, like you're probably throwing that PR away. It's just like what you're doing is totally different with the code

\[00:12:21\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. I, yeah, I think that's, that's exactly right. Like the If you think about a diff even, right? And how like the, the presentation of a PR. So let's pretend for a second that human's gonna read it. The presentation of alphabetical order by sort of tree structure of files, and then the associated lines in numerical order that have changed within those files.

\[00:12:49\] **Rob Zuber:** If it's 10 lines of change and you could see it all on a screen, you're like, "Cool, that makes sense." Right? But when you're talking about what you can easily produce in a small increment of \[00:13:00\] time with a, with an agent today, there- which therefore feels like a useful unit, right? Like taking a 2,000 line PR and breaking it up into 10 lines at a time is nonsense, right?

\[00:13:12\] **Rob Zuber:** And then tack on your standard PR delay, which you'll get out of your numbers, right? Like why would we do that to ourselves? So if you look at that whole thing, then a question that I've been asking, and I don't know that I have-- I'm starting to see ideas floating around. I don't have any great answers yet, is how we can present the diff when a human needs to review it in a way that is useful to the human, right?

\[00:13:33\] **Rob Zuber:** Like what is the structural intent-oriented diff? And then within that the machines have said, "Oh, okay, if that's the intent, then this does what it should." Or, "If that's the intent, this part looks a little bit sus, and this is a kind of thing that looks like someone should review it from a security perspective."

\[00:13:52\] **Rob Zuber:** So these 20 or 30 lines are worth looking at, right? But we open that up and we go, "Oh my gosh," you know, GitHub's like, \[00:14:00\] "Diff isn't rendered because it's too big." That's basically what the page says, right? That's what it says on all of our PRs right now. I'm like, "Well, that's, how is that even useful to me?"

\[00:14:08\] **Rob Zuber:** But what I really want is, "Hey Rob, machines covered 95% of this, this little-- to have a look here and have a look here kind of thing." You know, uh, I just thought of this when, when someone hands me a legal document and I know they've done a good job, and there's just like tape flags that say, "Sign

\[00:14:25\] **Andrew Zigler:** Yes

\[00:14:26\] **Rob Zuber:** sign here," kind of thing, right?

\[00:14:27\] **Rob Zuber:** Like Great. I have people that are way better at reviewing legal documents than me. I just happen to sometimes be the person that needs to sign it, right? And, and then there's actually this very similar human context that's like, who was the person that reviewed it, and how much do I trust them, and would I, you know, would I sign a thing that, you know, based on what they tell me about the thing, right?

\[00:14:50\] **Rob Zuber:** Or am I gonna sit here and read every line of it? Um, and so I think not just the surface when it can be, in a lot of cases, just automatically \[00:15:00\] moved on, right? So why are we doing all this interaction with agents talking to each other over some format? But also then when I do need a human, I think I'm gonna surface that.

\[00:15:09\] **Rob Zuber:** Oh, different use of surface. But anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna raise that up to them and flag it in a much more concise way, right? That's like, "Here's the intent of the whole thing. This part's a little bit suspect, so let's just take a look at that part. Everything else is good to go." Yeah

\[00:15:27\] **Andrew Zigler:** Right. It's like reevaluating who the process is for. Obviously, there's still a level of accountability that has to happen in most cases. A human still needs to answer for something. Someone needs to sign off on something. You're right, like maybe this moves towards just like the DocuSign experience of PRs where it just like moves you through the lines it wants you to sign off on or like put your eyes on and you're trusting some other system underneath.

\[00:15:52\] **Andrew Zigler:** Who knows? But it's, you have to, we have to acknowledge at least that new user experience and then also now the, the \[00:16:00\] brand new agent experience that they need to be effective at it are very different. And in that like diff-driven world, it made sense to show all of the files and like your folder hierarchy or in a semantic way that like we could glimpse and like know where other things lie.

\[00:16:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** But now that's noise for an agent who's like counting every single token going into it and trying to preciously contain it. So it's like what you're optimizing for in presenting information is totally different. That's actually been really exciting for me just as a developer is finding this new gla- this new class of like developer tooling, things in my CLI and, and otherwise part of my local coding process that aren't really for me.

\[00:16:39\] **Andrew Zigler:** Like the outputs of them, the, the however they're utilized are really for an agent to audit something or to have a, get a check on something that it otherwise has a hard time like getting a grip on. And, uh, just using those deterministically with an agent kind of lets them... It's like its own kind of guardrail, right?

\[00:16:56\] **Andrew Zigler:** And now suddenly you're bringing things that used to maybe be, \[00:17:00\] mm, maybe this would be surfaced as one of those stamps that's going on the PR. Now it's happening even closer to the developer even more locally, even more commonly before it hits like the PR surface. So how do you think about like the CI/CD getting like pulled down almost into developer machines because the development loop is now happening like in my, in my cloud platform or with my 30 sub-agents, you know?

\[00:17:24\] **Rob Zuber:** Right. Right. Exactly. I, I think there's a lot shifting more left, uh, you know, like as, as the-- even within the agent loop before it's asking for human intervention, right? Um, so we're, we're looking at a couple different things there. Uh, one, we launched something called Chunk Sidecars, which is basically like a direct attached CI quality validation environment that your agent is using as it works to say, "Okay, I made this change.

\[00:17:55\] **Rob Zuber:** Is that good? If not, I'll make some adjustments before I even, before I even tell the user, the \[00:18:00\] developer, 'Okay, this change is ready to go.'" Right? So we think of that as like, again, I call it CI-like, meaning it looks and f- well, I don't know if it even looks and feels. The quality of the validation, right, is gonna be much like what you're getting in your CI environments to break away from this, you know, works on my machine kind of problem, but happening in super short cycles, like we're thinking 30 to 60 seconds as, as a general target, and giving that feedback directly to the agent as it's working so that by the time it goes up to s- to like the more classic gate, right, of CI, meaning is this thing good to merge in and go to production, I have really high confidence.

\[00:18:41\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, and the, the other thing that I think about a lot in there is then, you know, who's, who's writing the tests, right? Like

\[00:18:50\] **Andrew Zigler:** Mm-hmm.

\[00:18:51\] **Rob Zuber:** the agent is gonna write the test too. Let's all be honest about that. No one's saying, "Oh yeah, let me just, let me just..." I mean, I do kind of in some types \[00:19:00\] of development, I'll do sort of a TDD style where I say, "What could possibly go wrong here, Claude or Codex or whatever?"

\[00:19:07\] **Rob Zuber:** A- and, and get an answer and say, "Cool. Can you write some tests that would expose that if it broke? Great. Now implement the thing." You know, and I kind of go through that, that process, and that's often when I'm sort of working through an idea versus have like a really clear plan of, of what's... But I will still, in all of that, I'm using the agent to write the test, which sounds amazing, but the agent loves, uh, I'll just generalize agents here.

\[00:19:32\] **Andrew Zigler:** Agents

\[00:19:32\] **Rob Zuber:** love to

\[00:19:33\] **Andrew Zigler:** test

\[00:19:35\] **Rob Zuber:** Well, yeah, or to stub everything out, right? To mock everything so you're not actually testing any of the business logic or any of the interaction with other systems or whatever. And it's like, cool, everything passes 'cause its goal is to get to green, not to get to like very clear, you know, validation that all of your intent is correct and correctly implemented, right?

\[00:19:54\] **Rob Zuber:** And so, um, I think there's a role, and we've been, we've been dabbling in this a \[00:20:00\] little bit, in Oh, I was trying to find the right words. But ensuring that your, your validation techniques are of high quality themselves, right? That if something broke within your software or if you made a mistake, it would actually get caught.

\[00:20:16\] **Rob Zuber:** And there's actually... What, what's, uh, really interesting right now, um, is we're still-- I feel like all cool things in software happened in like the '60s and '70s, and we're still pulling out techniques that people thought of back then and saying, "Wow, now we have the data and the compute power and everything else to actually use this."

\[00:20:38\] **Rob Zuber:** Like somebody wrote it on a napkin in the '70s. Uh, I was particularly, I'm thinking of something called mutation testing and they said, "This would be really cool." And everyone was like, "Yeah, where will we find the computers to do that?" Right? And now you could do that on a phone. You know, like the, the compute power that we have to, to drive this stuff is immense.

\[00:20:54\] **Rob Zuber:** And particular to have an LLM analyze your code and say, "Oh, these are the trouble spots. This \[00:21:00\] is where the risk is." Right? And I think risk analysis is a big thing when we talk about pulling out the kind of that DocuSign model, like pulling out, look at this and look at this and look at this, right? So our ability to assess risk and then to assess the quality of our risk assessment, right?

\[00:21:16\] **Rob Zuber:** Is all getting back to like what are we doing as engineers,

\[00:21:21\] **Andrew Zigler:** feeds in

\[00:21:22\] **Rob Zuber:** where we're putting our energy as opposed to like I sit here and I build a product, right? Because that's scalable, right? We, we've been doing continuous improvement as an industry for years, but now we're scaling that by saying let's improve the machines that build the software, right?

\[00:21:38\] **Rob Zuber:** And if we actually work that the same way we've worked historically like incidents or any retros or whatever, then maybe the first time we just say, "Have at it machine," it's not gonna be great. But if we dial the tooling on every, every time we have to step in, right? That's kind of my other thing about the DocuSign model.

\[00:21:54\] **Rob Zuber:** Every time I sign for something, I want to say why was that exposed? Why was it possible to create this kind of risk \[00:22:00\] and how do we make the machines better so we do this correctly and I don't have to worry about it next time, right? And so, but if we don't start on that journey we won't, we won't get to the end of it.

\[00:22:09\] **Rob Zuber:** I think what's really interesting is in all-- like whoever you are, whatever company you work for, you have a competitor that's doing this right now that's doing it probably better than you, right? And so that's, that's like where a lot-- we were talking about kind of the pressure to keep going and to do more and to build more, right?

\[00:22:24\] **Rob Zuber:** It's like somebody... Everybody's kind of checking over their shoulder 'cause someone is, has just been enabled to really like take on, take on their business.

\[00:22:33\] **Andrew Zigler:** And there's so much, like, unexplored territory. We all know it. Like, the fog of war is the whole dang map. And so everyone is very nervously exploring and trying not to get stuck in corners, trying not to go down the wrong way and waste a bunch of oppor- opportunities or time while someone else went and found gold immediately.

\[00:22:51\] **Andrew Zigler:** Why couldn't that have been us? And so it's like that's the world that, like, I think a lot of engineering leaders are trying to navigate in. I love the shape of what you described how \[00:23:00\] those tools evolve, like this CI/CD-like or something. The word I've been using myself is this almost like a new class of linters. Like, it's not, it's not like smelling my code for, like, formatting stuff as much as it is working with the agent on these really small, tight loops on, like, like, it's editing code or reading code basis to kind of help keep it in guardrails. It's kind of like linting what it's able to do. And so, um, and, and, and those kinds of things are allowing us to close a loop that up until now was totally open. We would do the best we could as engineers to create this, like, ornate pipeline that has, like, all of the stuff that goes through and checks all of this human effort that goes through this unbounded system.

\[00:23:45\] **Andrew Zigler:** And it's, it-- Since it wasn't really a fully closed loop because AI didn't exist yet, it was kind of more like an instrument. Like, you held it, you played it. It was like a, it was like a single player kind of deal. But now it's exactly what's happened is what you've called out, is that, like, the loop is \[00:24:00\] closed, so now you can run it.

\[00:24:01\] **Andrew Zigler:** "Hey, Mr. Machine, do your thing." And even if it's not perfect the first time, now we can iterate because we spent all of that time building this instrument and playing this instrument. And while we're not maybe the ones playing the notes anymore, we know how it was all laid out and why we made the decisions we made to get there.

\[00:24:17\] **Andrew Zigler:** And now, uh, we're in a world where it can make itself better, where it can find new purposes, new usage, and new tools, and that's just gonna require a lot of experimenting and a lot of measuring too

\[00:24:28\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah

\[00:24:29\] **Andrew Zigler:** what works for an org. Because all of that's exciting and, like, cool to talk about on, like, an individual practitioner level. You get lots of folks who've unlocked, like, 10x or 100x outputs as engineers and are, are, are super agentic, and they're kind of leading the charge within their engineering orgs. Uh, but on an aggregate level, I'd say as an industry, most orgs, especially the larger they are, tend to be more on the less mature side of understanding AI's impact on their, on their organization.

\[00:24:59\] **Andrew Zigler:** You know, "Oh, we \[00:25:00\] know we have Claude Code. We know we have Cursor. We know we love Codex, and our, our engineers are using a lot of tokens." And you've even seen this narrative recently about, like, people trying to track how many tokens, um, they're burning. Uh, are they ma- maximizing it, or now are they minimizing it?

\[00:25:16\] **Andrew Zigler:** Like, everyone has a different opinion about this now, um, but I feel like people still miss the whole thesis of, like, what did the code do after it was made? Did it even get merged? Did it cause an outage? Did it get reworked later on? Did it exist for a nice long time? Did it completely add, add completely brand new code instead of opting to maybe refactor something that would've made more sense?

\[00:25:41\] **Andrew Zigler:** Like, those are missed signals, I think, for most organizations. Curious how you think about leading your engineering org right now and how y'all stay tuned on, like, the output signals that matter.

\[00:25:52\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. It's, it's super relevant that, I mean, e- everything you're saying, the, \[00:26:00\] um, the cost is real, right? Everyone-- The, the, the time span from, "Hey, we gotta motivate everyone to use these tools 'cause there's real opportunity here," to like, "Oh, hold up. What is everyone doing?" You know? Was a week, I think, in many organizations, you know?

\[00:26:17\] **Rob Zuber:** And, um, and, and there's definitely a spectrum, right, of what you can achieve uh, and what that's going to cost. Um, and the costs, you know, if you look at it in just raw cost, right? So ignore at your peril, but ignore for a second budgets, right? And actual how much cash you have on hand as a company. So if you ignore that for a second and you just did the math and said, you know, for, for what feels like an exorbitant spend, I can, you know, 3x the output even, or the outcomes, let's pretend outcomes for a second.

\[00:26:56\] **Rob Zuber:** I can 3x the outcomes of an engineer for a 50% increase \[00:27:00\] in cost. Like, most people would do that all day, every day, right? But it costs real money. Like, someone has to r- someone has to write the check. I mean, there's not actual check anymore. It's 2026\. But, you know, money is coming out of bank accounts and going to other bank accounts when this occurs, and, you know, Uber kind of famously, and there's been other examples since, came out in March and said, "We spent our whole token budget for the year," right?

\[00:27:26\] **Rob Zuber:** And like, people care, the investors care, business leaders care about total cash spend. That's a, that's a real thing. It matters, right? And so then the question becomes, you know, what i- what is the right amount and how do we navigate that as we grow? And, and if I tripled the outcomes of an individual engineer, let's try to make the math as simple as possible.

\[00:27:52\] **Rob Zuber:** If I triple the outcomes and I only spend 15% more, like 50% of their salary on tokens or whatever, that would be great if the \[00:28:00\] minute they merged, I started realizing the revenue increase, right? But that's not what happens in soft- like, sadly, it's not what happens in software. And so there's still a time delay, and in that time delay, I've spent the money and I haven't earned back the money, right?

\[00:28:16\] **Rob Zuber:** And that would also be if we were perfect at building things that always returned in terms of revenue. It's more like a portfolio. We get more for some things and less for other things. So all that to say, there's a lot of scary math that, that is, y- you know, is difficult to navigate right now, and like predictability is often as valuable, if not more valuable in finance than the actual magnitude, right?

\[00:28:41\] **Rob Zuber:** If I can forecast it, I can manage around it. If it just comes out of the blue because one day some developer realized how to write a for loop, right, and spun up 100 parallel agents that were just working nonstop 24/7, none of it was producing anything. Like, that's great, but the money's gone before I even notice it's \[00:29:00\] happening, right?

\[00:29:00\] **Rob Zuber:** And so there's a lot of, you know, a lot of people are building controls. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to put caps in place. P- they're doing things like routing, you know, okay, how can I route this lower, you know, trying to educate people on How, well, you don't need Opus for everything or y- you know, those sorts of, like, this, it's happening all over the industry.

\[00:29:24\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, and I, I would say for us at CircleCI just as, as our engineering team, we're exploring a lot of things, but we're trying not to throw too much at our people. Like one thing we've realized is, uh, so some people just wanna get some stuff done, right? Like not for everyone every day cannot be try this new tool, try this new tool.

\[00:29:47\] **Rob Zuber:** Now we've changed the way that we're gonna do this and we've changed the way that we're gonna do this. It's like great, by the time I get updated on today's stack, it's time to go home and then tomorrow learn tomorrow's stack, right? Like we, we need people to build stuff. So, you know, we, we kind of keep an eye on \[00:30:00\] the outliers, right?

\[00:30:02\] **Rob Zuber:** Hey, we see that you've sort of picked up some pace here. That's awesome. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're doing? 'Cause it seems like there's much higher spend than outcome or output even. Let's worry about output. It's probably actually easier. I'll, I'll revert my previous statement 'cause we don't have to worry about like whether we're building the right things.

\[00:30:17\] **Rob Zuber:** Let's just talk about building stuff, right? And, and sort of, hey, just show me a little bit of what you're doing. Like could I tune a little bit about how you think about using the tools? Could we just click on that thing there that says Opus and set that to Sonnet and see if we get the same results? You know, like just really basic tweaks because we, we wanna encourage people to, to build and learn and drive.

\[00:30:38\] **Rob Zuber:** And as we... Well, I, I'll get to that in one second. So without a lot of like either I need everyone to be super educated and detailed and under- like what's the point of a layer of abstraction if I need you to understand everything inside of it? And without forcing, again, like new tools down everyone's throat every day, right?

\[00:30:56\] **Rob Zuber:** Now I need you to switch to this, now I need you to switch to this. So we're trying to be like a little \[00:31:00\] reasoned about it and pick the points that are gonna be high leverage and, and sort of, um, like take advantage of them. And then the other thing that we're spending time on is as we discover tools and techniques or whatever, can we make those available to everyone in ways that they don't even really have to think about, right?

\[00:31:20\] **Rob Zuber:** So I mean, generally, something as simple as a skill will get you to an outcome faster and burn less tokens or fewer tokens 'cause the agent isn't figuring it out for itself over and over, right? So can we take those and distribute them well across the organization, make this part of how people work? Like I don't need you to understand the skill as long as the skills are readily available in your agent and the first thing, you know, the likely thing to happen is that when you ask an agent to do something, it's gonna follow that skill, right?

\[00:31:50\] **Rob Zuber:** And so there's a lot of that kind of work, but I guess to, you know, to summarize it would be like I don't wanna put the onus on every individual 'cause one, humans are \[00:32:00\] fallible, right? We know that. We're gonna forget to do stuff. We're gonna mistype stuff. That's fine. It should-- That should be fine, right?

\[00:32:07\] **Rob Zuber:** And I also don't wanna create a huge amount of churn, so I look for like where are the kinda h- high leverage points as well as the outliers. What can I learn from the outliers, and then how can I take that and bake that into kind of the things that they just end up with for free?

\[00:32:20\] **Andrew Zigler:** Yeah. It's really important that you create some sort of ecosystem or, like, substrate for your, your engineers and just your whole organization really, 'cause everyone's benefiting from this ev- uh, event, is to share what's working. Like, we've... That's a practice that's really stood out among all of the, I would say, like, the top engineering org leaders that we've had on this show about, like, what differentiated their orgs, like speed and what it was able to accomplish with, with its own product.

\[00:32:50\] **Andrew Zigler:** Like, not making something that new, like working in brownfield stuff and doing really messy operations and migrations, and it always, always, always came down to, you know, shared skills, \[00:33:00\] shared ecosystem of, of agents. Somebody in this problem, over in this org solves this particular problem, and now there's a way to distribute it to everybody, so we're not all constantly re- reinventing, relearning the same stuff in a silo, which is crazy expensive for what we're trying to do right now. And exactly to your point, like, your job as an engineering manager becomes even abstract because we talked earlier in this conversation about how, like, oh, now the engineers, we're managers and we're, we're managing, we're influencing this environment to have this outcome that we want. Now you are influencing the people who are influencing these little micro environments that are influencing the outcome that then you are paying for.

\[00:33:44\] **Andrew Zigler:** So it's like this huge even bigger loop, um, and so you have to have these practices of, like, you know, uh, understanding what models folks are using, of having, picking the right model for the task. Like, we've talked a lot on this show re- especially recently, you know, like, all \[00:34:00\] so many open source models have hit the scene recently that are just, like, really top-notch and are really working for, for orgs and bringing their bills down really low, and unlocking just, like, new architecture because now suddenly they can run something through 10 agents at a third of the cost or something.

\[00:34:16\] **Andrew Zigler:** So you're seeing a lot of cool innovation, um, with these types of models. But along the way, it's like we have to learn when to choose the right model for the task. And I think that has a bigger payoff from a lot of engineering orgs than maybe they give it credit for, is if you really helped educate and onboard folks about when you reach for Opus or when you reach for a Sonnet, or even if like, you know, you're gonna slum it up with a Haiku, know when to pull that one out.

\[00:34:44\] **Andrew Zigler:** So like understanding the impact, uh, I think on the show recently I said back when we had Fable, you know, for like five seconds,

\[00:34:52\] **Rob Zuber:** Hmm.

\[00:34:52\] **Andrew Zigler:** um, I said like, "Don't, don't use Fable to check your mail like you're riding a dragon. Like you don't take your dragon to go to get your mail," right? And I think that's \[00:35:00\] the reality of like, um, so many engineering orgs in the last year is it's kind of like, uh, all the execs just like rolled up to the office with all these like Ferraris and then just like threw the keys to like all the

\[00:35:13\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah

\[00:35:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** like, "Go have fun.

\[00:35:15\] **Andrew Zigler:** Vroom, vroom." And they're out in the parking lot. They're doing wheel- they're doing like, you know, cartwheels or whatever. Like the wheels are spinning around, the whole, there's smoke everywhere. Yeah, they're using all of the gas. Yeah, they're putting lots of miles on the machine. Yeah, they're like fully understanding how to drift it and turn ups out and do whatever.

\[00:35:30\] **Andrew Zigler:** But then when you're done and all the smoke clears, you know, what do you have? Like they didn't build anything. They didn't even go to a racetrack and like win a race against somebody else. They just are doing wheelies in like the parking lot of your office. And that's what a lot of engineering orgs have been doing understand- getting like a control on their AI spend and tying it to like the outputs and, uh, understanding that it's a system that you have to influence. Uh, so that's like been the biggest challenge I think for folks.

\[00:35:58\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. I, I think \[00:36:00\] that's, I think that's exactly right. And, and, uh, there's a couple pieces in there that really about the learning, right? Like absolutely, y- you do need to take some time. Like, you're not gonna win a race if you didn't at least take the car out to the parking lot and go around a few cones or whatever, right?

\[00:36:18\] **Rob Zuber:** Like, not, not to downplay racing. I think it takes a lot more than that. But, um, so, so, you know, you need a little bit of space, I think, for, for ICs to learn. Um, and you need some space. As leaders, it's easier to make space. You need some space, in my, my personal opinion, some investment from leaders to learn.

\[00:36:40\] **Rob Zuber:** Uh, because to have, you know, useful, credible, productive conversations with your team about how we're going to use these tools effectively and what that might mean for us, like, as a leader, uh, you need to unders- to understand it, right? Like, I, I could just say, "Please choose \[00:37:00\] the right model," and then someone's gonna say to me, "Well, when should I choose?"

\[00:37:03\] **Rob Zuber:** And I'd be like, "I don't know. I've never used any of this stuff. Like, figure it out. You're an engineer." You know, it's, it's not a really helpful conversation.

\[00:37:09\] **Andrew Zigler:** Mm-hmm.

\[00:37:09\] **Rob Zuber:** And, you know, then someone says to you, "Well, it only ever works if I use this model," right? And you're like, "Oh, I don't know. I heard on the internet that it's possible to do other stuff."

\[00:37:16\] **Rob Zuber:** Like, it, you know, there was such a a loss of experience for most engineering leaders in a very short window of time. Much like every IC, to varying degrees and different outcomes, went through a what am I in this? Like, what expertise do I have? What do I bring to the table? Is what I've learned and done in the past interesting and valuable?

\[00:37:42\] **Rob Zuber:** The answer is yes, but like how do I take it and apply it to this scenario? Leaders go through the same thing, right? Because as leaders, a lot of our credibility, a lot of our ability to solve problems or to guide people through problems comes from our years of experience. And how software systems are put \[00:38:00\] together, still valuable, but how I sit and build something day to day, totally different now, right?

\[00:38:04\] **Rob Zuber:** So, um, for me, a big part of this has been investing time and energy in using all the different tools. And not just like I typed something into Claude Code once, but you know, I've used Claude Code and Cursor and Codex and Pi, and I've tried some open weight models and personally had terrible results, but it taught me something about what else I would want from them, right?

\[00:38:23\] **Rob Zuber:** Like I tried to go to the cheapest possible thing just to see what would happen, and it was, it was abysmal. And I was like, "Cool, that's interesting," but I see how they're progressing, and could I build a system that I could put that really basic model into that would then produce a result, right? Like to your point, if I could do more passes, right?

\[00:38:41\] **Rob Zuber:** Can I tune that in a way that gets the same result as just going and getting the Dragon model, right? But I'm using my Salamander. I'm not really sure what scale we operate on when the top end is a dragon. Yeah, exactly.

\[00:38:54\] **Andrew Zigler:** Yeah

\[00:38:55\] **Rob Zuber:** Like I'm going to use that and it's going to give me a little bit, like a little increment, and I can, you \[00:39:00\] know, work my way there or whatever.

\[00:39:01\] **Rob Zuber:** But to even have, for me, I know people think differently and I have my own biases or whatever, but to even reason about that intelligently and to be able to ask good questions of my people and sort of push them to try new things, um, it's been a, it's been a big investment for me in just developing my own, my own understanding.

\[00:39:21\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, yeah, and then, I mean, I think this is for those of us in developer tools, an added bonus or maybe an added driver. Like I have to understand what my customers are going through and able to bui- to be able to build the right product for them. And if I don't understand the tools and I don't understand what my own people are going through, there's no way I'm going to understand what my customer is going through to be able to say, "Oh, we, we tried that and here's what we did.

\[00:39:49\] **Rob Zuber:** By the way, we added this capability to our product or here it is for free because we just, it was, it's not really interesting as a product," depending on what it is. Um, and so, you know, it's been a real journey \[00:40:00\] for me, for leaders in my organization to, you know, to try to understand where all this is going.

\[00:40:07\] **Rob Zuber:** And again, where, where it's going today, tomorrow it might be slightly different, but I feel like we're getting a handle on it in a way that we at least have some strong opinions about what to do.

\[00:40:16\] **Andrew Zigler:** Yeah, we're in this, like, messy middle now for sure, uh, in terms of, like, there's a lot of stuff that we know we don't know and that we have plenty of time to optimize o- on. You know, the jagged frontier of they could stop innovating on all things AI and dropping new models today, and there'd still be years upon years upon years, decades even, of work to be done just in terms of figuring out what do we do with all of the stuff in our hands.

\[00:40:37\] **Andrew Zigler:** But that's not how the pace is going. It's gonna ... We're gonna get even more stuff. It's gonna go even faster. There's gonna be turns up ahead that we don't, we don't see yet, which also speaks to, um, kind of the environment that engineering leaders are in in general. They have to be nimble. We're not in an environment where you can start, like, building that castle, like, brick by brick because everyone knows very much so that, like, you probably are gonna have to pick up each of those bricks and carry them somewhere else, \[00:41:00\] maybe in the next 12 months even, you know?

\[00:41:02\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, um, it's, it's so true. I-- It's probably... We talked about curiosity, right, as a trait, um, and it's absolutely a good trait to have at the moment. I identify as entrepreneurial. You know, to say, "Oh, I've been at the same company for 12 years," doesn't sound entrepreneurial, but like I've, I did many things.

\[00:41:29\] **Rob Zuber:** But all of my career has been starting companies and,

\[00:41:33\] **Andrew Zigler:** software. You

\[00:41:34\] **Rob Zuber:** into companies and whatever. Y-yeah, exactly. And, and so it's a good time to have that mindset, I think, right? Like if, if you've built a company and gone through multiple pivots, not this one, but the, you know, the thing that, that our CEO and I did, but ended up at, that it got us into CircleCI.

\[00:41:55\] **Rob Zuber:** Like if that's how you think and that's how you reason about s- y-you know, then the next pivot \[00:42:00\] doesn't feel significant. And I'm not saying like tomorrow CircleCI is gonna be selling teddy bears online or something, but things shift so much. And whether it's internal, like how our approach and how we want people to work and whatever, uh, you know, there's a lot of questions out there about how traditional roles start to break down.

\[00:42:18\] **Rob Zuber:** Like what is the makeup of a product team? Um, do we have this kind of delineation of designer and PM and EM and tech lead and whatever? Or, you know, do things get a little smaller and people just form groups that happen to have those attributes, you know? And, and if you're comfortable with reinvention in a way that I think in an entrepreneurial world you're just comfortable with a lot of stuff, then that comes naturally.

\[00:42:45\] **Rob Zuber:** If you, much like the IC who believes what they do is write lines of code, you know, if you're a leader who's built their whole career on, you know, building large organizations structured in a particular way, and \[00:43:00\] that's kind of your playbook and you rely on that playbook, like someone just pointed a blowtorch at your playbook.

\[00:43:06\] **Rob Zuber:** Maybe it was the dragon actually. Maybe the dragon burnt your playbook, but it doesn't exist anymore, right? And if you're clinging to that, then you're gonna, you're gonna have problems. Um, so I, I, I do think it's good to be comfortable and then acknowledging my own biases. Also, it's important to know that you're probably, as a leader, more comfortable than other people are.

\[00:43:29\] **Rob Zuber:** So there's a lot of change management, and it's happening at a pace that change m- like that change management can't happen, and that's really tough for organizations, right? It's like, I know we just started talking about that thing from yesterday, but also today there's a new change, and trying to help people through that has been, you know, is I think a big part of the job for a lot of folks right now.

\[00:43:48\] **Andrew Zigler:** Yeah. And I think in this conversation you've really shown a lot of light into the messy reality of being an engineering leader right now and being in charge of software coming into \[00:44:00\] being as, like, your direct influence on the code and the ultimate product get further and further away. I mean, we're moving into a world where, like, the code isn't even really necessarily where the truth is or where the interesting stuff is.

\[00:44:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** Um, a lot of that stuff now happens in the transcripts before the code or in the observability once it's been deployed or it's living in the wild. But in no world in that pathway do I think, uh, something like CI/CD would go away. If anything, I think CI/CD would just level up into this really amazing harness that sits on top of, like, the whole engineering process that also exists all the way out into the front gates of where your product goes out to interact with customers, but all the way back into the core of your org and on folks' machines and within their dev loops and available to their agents on demand.

\[00:44:50\] **Andrew Zigler:** And I think there's a lot of stuff that we call CI/CD that starts to fall into that world, and it becomes this big, exciting engineering problem to build towards. \[00:45:00\] It becomes this impossibly large problem space to solve for. But if there's anyone up that... Any... If there's anyone that I know is up for the challenge, it's you and CircleCI.

\[00:45:09\] **Andrew Zigler:** And so we're excited to follow where things go for you, uh, Rob. And just as we kind of bring things to a close as well, is there anywhere you wanna point folks towards to maybe learn about the latest, uh, from your engineering org, thoughts, uh, top of mind for you, product announcements as well?

\[00:45:25\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. I mean, uh, obviously our, our website circleci.com. Uh, I try to put what I'm thinking on LinkedIn. Um, sometimes I'm so buried in what I'm building that I forget to, to write about it, but, uh, that's a good spot. I mean, find me on LinkedIn. Um, those would be the two places I would start. And, uh, oh, we have a, we have a newsletter on LinkedIn also that I, that I would recommend.

\[00:45:49\] **Rob Zuber:** I mean, it's a place that we, we put... You know, we do this State of Software Delivery Report once a year, but we're thinking about it all the time and we've started pulling the numbers more regularly 'cause, like, what they looked like a year \[00:46:00\] ago, uh, is gonna be so irrelevant after a year. So we're trying to put that out in this, in this newsletter and, and then we pull individual insights from it.

\[00:46:09\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, it's called "The Confident Commit Newsletter," which is also the name of my podcast, "The Confident Commit." So,

\[00:46:14\] **Andrew Zigler:** Love it

\[00:46:15\] **Rob Zuber:** those are some options. Um, but, uh, yeah, we're doing our best. Uh, sometimes it feels like our thoughts by the time we try to write them down are irrelevant. You know what I mean? Like I

\[00:46:24\] **Andrew Zigler:** you're speaking my language right now. Doing this podcast right now is... I gotta move at the speed of light.

\[00:46:30\] **Rob Zuber:** Yeah. Yeah, it's wild, you know? And so I actually, uh, I have done my best. I happen to be in the Bay Area, which is super convenient. I'm going to an event tonight, in fact. Um, and, uh, gather.d- d- no one will... Well, it'll be too late to go to this one by the time you hear this, unless it's published in the next 30 minutes.

\[00:46:49\] **Rob Zuber:** Um, but gather.dev, which is, uh, like a director plus group here in, uh, in the Bay and in New York. So people hear it and should check that out. But, um, yeah, I just try to get out to as \[00:47:00\] many in-person things as I can. And again, I'm blessed by being in the Bay Area. There's a lot, actually. It's, it's more I'm the limit, not the number of events.

\[00:47:07\] **Rob Zuber:** Like, at some point you just can't go to that many. But, um,

\[00:47:09\] **Andrew Zigler:** Right

\[00:47:10\] **Rob Zuber:** because the real-time conversations are so, um, so important, you know, because by the next day, like, like I take that and I synthesize it into ideas, and then we move on and we move on from there, right? So again, I'm trying to put this stuff out, but I'm also sort of burying myself in these.

\[00:47:25\] **Rob Zuber:** And if you're ever at one of these events, uh, obviously you, but anyone that's listening to this, please come say hi. You know, I love to meet people and just learn about what other people are working on. Like I, I ha- I'm good at synthesizing, I think, but I don't have all the ideas, right? I mean, everyone's coming up with some amazing stuff and, uh, and just trying to see it all and piece it together is, is really fun for me.

\[00:47:46\] **Andrew Zigler:** so fun going out to events right now. So if you're in San Francisco and you happen to see Rob out in the wilds, be sure to approach him, say hello, say, say that you listen to One Dev Interrupted. Also be sure to reach out to us on LinkedIn. Uh, both Rob and \[00:48:00\] I love getting comments or, or questions or feedback from folks, whether you like or didn't like what we talked about today. Um, it's always good to be out there and interacting with folks. And so definitely come find us and share your opinions. And for everything that Rob mentioned as well, we'll include links into our show notes. And to you, our listener, thanks for joining us on Dev Interrupted by LinearB. It's been a blast, and we'll see you next time

\[00:48:23\] **Rob Zuber:** Awesome. Thank you

## Real conversations with top engineering leaders

Find us on

[](https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dev-interrupted/)
[](https://devinterrupted.substack.com/)

## Your next listen

[![Cover image for Models escaping containment, intelligence becoming a commodity, and AI code review to the rescue](https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/c_limit,w_2560/f_auto/q_auto/v1/ai_models_containment_code_review_commoditization_7ea901a97a?_a=BAVMn6ID0)](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/ai-agent-sandbox-escape-open-source-models-code-review-bottlenecks)

Dev Interrupted

[Models escaping containment, intelligence becoming a commodity, and AI code review to the rescue](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/ai-agent-sandbox-escape-open-source-models-code-review-bottlenecks)

On this episode of the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew break down the Hugging Face security breach caused by an OpenAI model, the rapid rise of open-source...

[![Cover image for The most underrated dataset in enterprise AI is your org chart | Rippling's Albert Strasheim](https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/c_limit,w_2560/f_auto/q_auto/v1/Blog_Comprehensive_DORA_Guide_2400x1256_68_43be6688ce?_a=BAVMn6ID0)](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/rippling-albert-strasheim-employee-graph-enterprise-ai-agents)

Dev Interrupted

[The most underrated dataset in enterprise AI is your org chart | Rippling's Albert Strasheim](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/rippling-albert-strasheim-employee-graph-enterprise-ai-agents)

AI agents can't transform an org they can't see. Albert Strasheim, CTO at Rippling, joins Andrew Zigler to explain why agentic transformation starts with the...

[![Cover image for Rebuilding CLIs for agents, it’s time to get MCP-certified, and why human code review will never catch up](https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/c_limit,w_2560/f_auto/q_auto/v1/agentic_cli_tools_mcp_certification_code_review_23be877e85?_a=BAVMn6ID0)](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/linux-foundation-mcp-certification-agentic-loops-pull-request-bottleneck)

Dev Interrupted

[Rebuilding CLIs for agents, it’s time to get MCP-certified, and why human code review will never catch up](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/linux-foundation-mcp-certification-agentic-loops-pull-request-bottleneck)

This week on the Friday Deploy, Ben and Andrew break down the Linux Foundation's new MCP certification and the fundamental mechanics of agentic loops. Discover...

## Structured data

_Machine-readable metadata (JSON-LD) embedded in the page for search/AI context — not content rendered on the page itself._

```json
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "LinearB",
  "url": "https://linearb.io",
  "logo": "https://assets.linearb.io/image/upload/v1715628027/logo-mark-lg.svg",
  "description": "LinearB is the engineering productivity platform that helps engineering leaders prove AI is improving throughput without sacrificing delivery confidence, flow efficiency, or developer experience.",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/linearb"
  ],
  "award": [
    {
      "@type": "Award",
      "name": "LinearB is a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Developer Productivity Insight Platforms",
      "dateAwarded": "2026",
      "awardedBy": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Gartner®"
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Award",
      "name": "Great Place to Work Certification",
      "dateAwarded": "2025-2027",
      "awardedBy": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Great Place to Work"
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Award",
      "name": "America's Best Startup Employers 2025",
      "dateAwarded": "2025",
      "awardedBy": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Forbes Magazine"
      }
    }
  ],
  "hasCertification": [
    {
      "@type": "Certification",
      "name": "SOC 1 Type 2"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Certification",
      "name": "SOC 2 Type 2"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Certification",
      "name": "GDPR Compliance certification"
    },
    {
      "@type": "Certification",
      "name": "ISO 27001"
    }
  ]
}
```

## More on linearb.io

### Top navigation

- [Book a Demo](https://linearb.io/book-a-demo)
- [AI Code Reviews — Catch security risks, bugs, and spec mismatches](https://linearb.io/platform/ai-code-reviews)
- [AI & Productivity Insights — See how AI tools affect cycle time and delivery speed](https://linearb.io/platform/ai-developer-productivity-insights)
- [Measure AI Impact — Track AI adoption and tie it to delivery outcomes](https://linearb.io/use-case/measure-ai-impact)
- [MCP Server — Chat with your data to spot patterns and boost output](https://linearb.io/platform/mcp-server)
- [Resource Allocation — Cost initiatives and shape your investment strategy](https://linearb.io/platform/resource-allocation)
- [Cost Capitalization — Capitalize engineering costs with audit-ready reports](https://linearb.io/platform/cost-capitalization)
- [Dev Team Management — Set targets and tie throughput to business outcomes](https://linearb.io/platform/goals-and-reporting)
- [DevOps Workflow Automation — Policy-based PR routing, approvals, and tests](https://linearb.io/platform/ai-workflow-governance)
- [AI Powered Support — Unify AI and human code delivery in one clear view](https://linearb.io/use-case/ai-powered-support)
- [Optimization — Surface friction with feedback and MCP insights](https://linearb.io/platform/developer-experience)
- [Reporting — Spot what's working and what needs attention](https://linearb.io/use-case/measuring-developer-experience)
- [Surveys — Turn developer feedback into actionable signals](https://linearb.io/platform/developer-surveys)
- [Platform overview](https://linearb.io/platform/overview)
- [Register now](https://linearb.io/event/engineering-productivity-gap)
- [Customers](https://linearb.io/customers)
- [Pricing](https://linearb.io/pricing)
- [Why choose LinearB — Explore your data. Measure performance. Act to improve it.](https://linearb.io/why-linearb)
- [APEX framework — The operating model for AI-era engineering teams](https://linearb.io/resources/apex-framework)
- [Anti-FAQ — The questions other vendors won't answer](https://linearb.io/why-linearb/anti-faq)
- [Security — Enterprise-grade compliance and zero code access](https://linearb.io/security)
- [Build vs. buy — The hidden cost of building it yourself](https://linearb.io/resources/build-vs-buy)
- [Dev Interrupted Podcast — Conversations with engineering leaders](https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcasts)
- [Reports & Guides — Deep dives on productivity and delivery](https://linearb.io/resources)
- [Webinars — Expert sessions on productivity and AI](https://linearb.io/resources?category=workshops)
- [Metrics Benchmarks — See how your engineering org stacks up](https://linearb.io/resources/software-engineering-benchmarks-report)
- [Blog — Product updates and practical insights](https://linearb.io/blog)
- [Help Center — Documentation, setup, and support](https://linearb.helpdocs.io)
- [API Docs](https://docs.linearb.io/api-overview)
- [Status](https://www.linearbstatus.com/)
- [Integrations](https://linearb.io/integrations)
- [LinearB is a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Developer Productivity Insight Platforms](https://linearb.io/resources/gartner-magic-quadrant-dpi-platforms-2026)
- [Sign in](https://app.linearb.io/login)
- [Enterprise](https://linearb.io/solutions/enterprise)
- [Contact](https://linearb.io/contact-us)
- [About us](https://linearb.io/about-us)
- [Careers](https://linearb.io/careers)
- [Service agreement](https://linearb.io/services-agreement)
- [Privacy policy](https://linearb.io/privacy-policy)
- [DPA](https://linearb.io/data-processing-agreement)
- [Security FAQ](https://linearb.io/security-faq)
- [Substack](https://devinterrupted.substack.com/)

### Footer

_Additional links from the site footer, not repeated from the top navigation above._

- [GitHub](https://github.com/linear-b)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/linearb)
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/LinearB_Inc)