Welcome to Runtime! Today: Google Cloud falls over; Glean co-founder Tony Gentilcore on measuring developer performance in the age of AI, are infosec leaders losing all patience with the frontier labs? and more.
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First up: Skill issues
For a minute there in January, it was as if every software developer in the world became instantly more productive with the debut of coding tools like Claude Code.
"It is incontrovertible that there are large portions of people that are getting like 10x value... in terms of what they're able to produce," said Tony Gentilcore, co-founder and head of engineering at Glean, in a recent interview with The Stack.
But for other developers, AI coding tools haven't magically unlocked the same results, and for some the deluge of code is making them less productive when it comes to the actual goal: shipping production software.
Tom Krazit
Developer productivity has been the third rail of software engineering management for a very long time, even as standards like DORA were developed to help companies understand that measuring engineers by their coding output doesn't really work. But AI tools have turned some of those assumptions on their head, especially given the expense of using those tools.
Gentilcore and his engineering leads came up with a metric that measures some of those traditional factors, but also analyzes token spend to determine a new "unit of work." When it comes time for performance review time, "it's helped with more thoughtful conversations about how you're actually using [AI], where you're using it, where you're applying it," he said.
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The rest of The Stack
Down but not out? Google Cloud's europe-west2 London region suffered a serious power-related incident this morning, knocking Revolut bank and others offline. European regulators, perennially concerned at cloud concentration risk, will be watching close. Revolut may want to learn from Monzo's cross-cloud DR...
Edward Targett
Send in the clowns: Anthropic is starting to really get on the nerves of enterprise cybersecurity professionals thanks to the never-ending stream of blog posts warning the world that its models are starting to get really scary. Over the weekend, SentinelOne's Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade decided he'd seen enough.
Edward Targett
Missed connections: ConnectWise was forced to suspend its cloud backup and recovery services over the weekend after its OAuth app was compromised, which allowed hackers to get into some Microsoft 365 tenants. "One compromised OAuth application with elevated permissions could give attackers access to emails, files, and directory data across hundreds of Microsoft 365 tenants," Nextron Research's Florian Roth said.
Edward Targett
Command, mastered: The supply-chain attacks continued on Monday, this time hitting a GitHub account belonging to a developer at French cloud provider OVHCloud. That allowed a hacker to insert malware into a version of its command-line interface tool, and while the company responded quickly, the fact that a customer discovered the issue is not a great look.
Edward Targett
Stack ranking — Enterprise moves
Alexander Thomson and Patricia Tantlow are the new CEO and chief marketing officer, respectively, at Cloudbolt Software.
Shilpa Varma is the new chief technology officer at Backstory, joining the sales software company after tech leadership roles at HubSpot and Box.
Vasu Jakkal is the new chief strategy and business officer at Armadin, joining the security company after six years running Microsoft's security software business.
Mark Thornberry is the new chief business officer at GuidePoint Security, a promotion from his previous role as senior vice president of partnerships.
Mark Long is the new chief financial officer at Supermicro, joining the scandal-prone server company after operational and financial leadership roles at Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
We're also reading:
Agents as insider threat: Microsoft is ramping up its ability to try and control/secure agents operating across customer systems, on the principle, per Satya Nadella, that "unfortunately, frontier models, regardless of their origin, cannot be trusted." Nadim Abdo, Redmond's VP for identity and network access, has more.
DHS Orders DeepSeek Technology Removed From Federal Civilian IT System: As of right now, that order doesn't appear to target other Chinese open-weight companies like Z.ai or Moonshot AI.
What requirements don't you have?: GitHub's Sean Goedecke explains why no matter what level of AI coding proficiency you have, gathering requirements for product design is still a team sport.
Thanks for reading — see you Thursday!
