Generative AI is dissolving the economic logic that made standardized enterprise software the only practical choice for most companies. What replaces it will be shaped not just by the rapidly evolving capabilities of this new technology, but by leaders willing to ask a harder question: Which workflows do we actually need to own?
Dependabot sounded the alarm on a large scale. Thousands of repositories automatically received pull requests and warnings, including a high vulnerability score and signals about possible compatibility issues. According to Valsorda, this shows that the tool mainly checks whether a dependency is present, without analyzing whether the vulnerable code is actually accessible within a project.
I once transitioned from a SaaS CTO role to become a business unit CIO at a Fortune 100 enterprise that aimed to bring startup development processes, technology, and culture into the organization. The executives recognized the importance of developing customer-facing applications, game-changing analytics capabilities, and more automated workflows. Let's just say my team and I did a lot of teaching on agile development and nimble architectures.
The real cost of poor observability isn't just downtime; it's lost trust, wasted engineering hours, and the strain of constant firefighting. But most teams are still working across fragmented monitoring tools, juggling endless alerts, dashboards, and escalation systems that barely talk to one another, which acts like chaos disguised as control. The result is alert storms without context, slow incident response times, and engineers burned out from reacting instead of improving.
Your coding apprentice can build, at your direction, pretty much anything now. The task becomes more like conducting an orchestra than playing in it. Not all members of the orchestra want to conduct, but given that is where things are headed, I think we all need to consider it at least.
One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I've asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt...) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn't ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself.
