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The MonkCast

A RedMonk Production

Technology analysis and insights from the RedMonk team

Join us for in-depth conversations with technology thought leaders, industry experts, and the RedMonk analysts as we explore the intersection of technology, business, and culture.

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Latest Episodes

Anne Bertucio de Hollembeak on Why Open Source Needs Trust & Safety - Cover Art
New Episode
October 15, 2026

Anne Bertucio de Hollembeak on Why Open Source Needs Trust & Safety

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to Roost and Ambertuccio's Background02:53 Understanding Trust and Safety in Online Spaces05:44 The Role of Open Source in Trust and Safety08:43 Child Safety Tools and Their Impact11:29 Mila's Suicide Prevention Guardrail Project14:21 AI Contributions and Community Engagement17:20 Maintainer Burnout and AI Slop Management26:13 Introduction to Bug Bounty and Security Processes26:57 Understanding Osprey: The Tool for Safety and Investigation28:18 The Story Behind Osprey and Its Origins30:22 Roost: A Nonprofit Approach to Open Source Safety32:04 Partnerships and Collaborations in the Safety Space33:46 Blue Sky: A Case Study in Collaboration35:21 Challenges in Decentralized Safety Solutions37:14 Addressing the Bot Issue and AI Challenges43:47 Open Source Policies and Their Implications45:49 Conclusion and Resources for Further Engagement

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Inside the AWS Agent Toolkit with Liam Greenamyre - Cover Art
October 8, 2026

Inside the AWS Agent Toolkit with Liam Greenamyre

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to AI in Software Development03:07 The Uneven Adoption of AI in Development Teams06:20 Strategies for Successful AI Integration10:09 Exploring the AWS Agent Toolkit17:01 Guardrails and Context for AI Agents20:10 The Impact of AI on FinOps and Cost Management24:28 Evolution of Agent Tooling32:17 Enhancing Discoverability in AWS35:56 Guardrails and Safety in AWS Operations41:03 Future of AI in Software Development

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Securing Enterprise Open Source with Coalitions & Clearing Houses: Lightwell from IBM & Red Hat - Cover Art
October 1, 2026

Securing Enterprise Open Source with Coalitions & Clearing Houses: Lightwell from IBM & Red Hat

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/Chapters00:00 Introduction: IBM's big bet on open source security03:18 A win-win for customers and the open source community05:27 The problem: 60–70% of the stack is unsupported open source07:15 Carry your own fork or hope upstream fixes it09:17 Eat your vegetables first: hardened images and paid platforms09:45 How Lightwell works11:57 Scope: application dependencies12:57 Network effects, industry clearinghouses, and identity washing14:34 When to move off orphaned projects16:04 Mythos showed how bad things already were19:51 Delivery via Maven, PyPI, and npm20:33 Attackers vs. defenders at machine speed21:44 Why fixes should be deterministic code, not endless AI23:06 Token economics and shared remediation24:05 Nobody needs to scan OpenSSL separately25:08 Will every enterprise build its own software?27:38 Wrap-up

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Platform Engineering 2.0: Evolution, Not a Reset with Pankaj Gupta - Cover Art
September 29, 2026

Platform Engineering 2.0: Evolution, Not a Reset with Pankaj Gupta

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to Sponsorships00:08 Introduction to Platform Engineering02:52 Current State and Challenges of Platform Engineering05:47 The Evolution of Platform Engineering08:33 AI's Impact on Platform Engineering11:23 The Rise of Agent Personas14:52 Five Pillars of Modern Platform Engineering17:47 Next Steps for Platform Engineers

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The BOM Explosion & Why PQC Stopped Being 10 Years Away with David Pollak & Allan Friedman - Cover Art
September 24, 2026

The BOM Explosion & Why PQC Stopped Being 10 Years Away with David Pollak & Allan Friedman

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to the Guests and Topics06:29 The State of SBOMs in 202613:46 Understanding Cryptographic Bills of Materials22:12 The Intersection of Security and Development31:25 The CBOM Approach and Its Importance33:23 Post-Quantum Cryptography: A Future Concern?38:55 Navigating Regulations and Compliance43:57 Finding vs. Fixing Vulnerabilities in Open Source49:58 AI's Role in Security and Vulnerability Management53:31 Lessons from IPv6 and Cryptography Libraries

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Good Wigs & Golden Paths: Dev Tools in the AI Era with Victoria Melnikova - Cover Art
September 17, 2026

Good Wigs & Golden Paths: Dev Tools in the AI Era with Victoria Melnikova

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to Dev Tools and Product Market Fit10:52 Understanding Product Market Fit in DevTools18:19 The Shifting Landscape of DevTools and AI25:33 Agent Experience and Its Impact on DevTools28:54 Navigating Agent Experience and AI Integration34:17 The Future of Hiring in Tech38:58 Designing with AI: Balancing Human Touch and Automation47:09 Security in Open Source and AI

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"Somebody is always paying the token bill": AI and Open Source with Brian Proffitt & Jason Brooks - Cover Art
September 10, 2026

"Somebody is always paying the token bill": AI and Open Source with Brian Proffitt & Jason Brooks

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/Chapters00:04 Introduction to AI and Open Source Governance00:32 Guest Introductions: Jason Brooks and Brian Proffitt02:10 AI's Ubiquity and Industry Impact03:06 Guardrails for AI Code Quality in Projects04:22 Implementing Human Speed Bumps for AI Contributions05:17 Encouraging Transparency in AI Contributions06:46 Automated Review and Guardrails in Open Source07:50 Verifying AI-Generated Code in Fedora09:10 Human Oversight in AI Processes13:39 Developer Burnout and Managing Contribution Floods16:09 Trust and Transparency in AI-Driven Ecosystems18:30 Evolving Policies for AI in Fedora20:16 Future Challenges and Community Trust in AI21:11 Closing Remarks and Future Outlook

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