The Enterprise AI Show

Brandon interviews Dan Manges, co-founder and CEO of RWX, about why continuous integration is the bottleneck for engineering teams working with coding agents. Manges, previously CTO at Braintree and Root, explains that he started RWX after watching CI tooling fail to scale with fast-growing codebases in regulated industries. He argues that feedback loops under five to ten minutes keep engineers in a flow state, and that slower loops push people (and agents) into costly context switching.

Manges describes how RWX differs from traditional CI platforms. Instead of splitting pipelines into jobs that each spin up a virtual machine and repeat the same setup, RWX models work as a directed graph of tasks with declared dependencies, so everything runs with maximum parallelization and only once. He cites Datadog's recent blog post about the strain that cloning code across so many parallel jobs put on its Git servers. Failures can be retried from the point of failure, and compute can be sized per step. He explains that RWX uses content-based caching rather than Docker's lineage-based caching, so a cache miss can be followed by a cache hit and only the work affected by a change runs. Under the hood, he says, RWX built its own distributed container runtime on the same low-level primitives as Docker, runs on AWS, and is hosted by default, with an option to run inside a customer's own VPC.

On agents, Manges says every RWX workflow can run from a CLI without a commit and push, which gives agents a fast, synchronous, more accurate and token-efficient loop. He recommends telling agents to run the CI workflow before they open a pull request, so the status check goes green instantly through caching, and argues there is no longer a reason for a human to be in the loop for build failures. He notes that review practices will vary widely, from thorough human review to software factory automation, and mentions a customer that has agents write throwaway Playwright tests for QA. He describes Honeycomb's move from CircleCI, which he says doubled their PR velocity, and the "AI legible CI" they describe. Looking ahead, Manges says the bottleneck in software engineering is shifting from writing code to validating it, and that RWX is expanding into sandboxes, preview apps, and custom webhooks. He says customers have asked about code hosting and review, but he promises nothing.

SHOW: 1073
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1073 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/2QnbYmRltgM 

SHOW SPONSORS:
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SHOW LINKS
RWX
Honeycomb switches to RWX for agent-ready CI/CD
AI Amplifies Existing Practices: Lessons from Our AI Shift
How Datadog Rebuilt Git Serving for CI (gitretriever)

GUEST BIO
Dan Manges is the co-founder and CEO of RWX, a cloud platform for running CI/CD and other automation for engineering teams and their coding agents. He was previously the founding CTO of Braintree, the payments company that acquired Venmo and was acquired by PayPal, and co-founded car insurance carrier Root, which went public in 2020.
Contact Dan Manges:
LinkedIn: dmanges
Twitter/X: @dan_manges
GitHub: dan-manges
Medium: @dan_manges
Website: dan-manges.com

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Brian and Brandon open mid-October’s AI news of the month by asking whether a yes-or-no answer engine like Jev could have saved the Commanders from a clock-management meltdown, and why a binary classifier is worth a reported $7.5 billion. A six-month check-in on their May AI draft leaves the scorecard roughly even, with Anthropic the clear winner over Google. Then come the financial cracks. CoreWeave’s borrowing costs have reportedly jumped from around 7% to about 15%, adding to Oracle’s contract pullback as yellow flags for the neocloud and data center layer. Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI keep pulling in revenue even as enterprise CIOs struggle to find ROI. Brandon weighs Andrej Karpathy’s claim that only a few thousand people have seen what AI can really do against the labs’ opposite storytelling styles. The pair also question why Meta keeps promoting its frontier models when its Muse personal agent looks like the real monetization story. They close on whether software fundamentally changed in the last two weeks. Brandon argues AI has put professional-grade app building within reach of millions, pointing to his upcoming PodEditor app, but says finding demand and building a business are as hard as ever. They see Bending Spoons’ model of running acquired apps with AI and a skeleton crew as a possible playbook for established vendors.

SHOW: 1072
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1072 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/Kp7AH_IdwIg

SHOW SPONSORS:
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Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 

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Brandon interviews Dominic Williams, founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, about the Internet Computer and why he set out to build a new back-end compute stack. Williams traces his path from building the kids' MMO Fight My Monster, one of the first serious production users of Cassandra, to decentralized networks and the founding of DFINITY in 2016. He explains the thesis behind the Internet Computer: a stack of software running down to the silicon can never be fully secured, so he wanted a cloud created by a network protocol, where software is tamper-proof, always on, and secure by default without firewalls, patches, or security and sysadmin teams.

Williams walks through how it works. Code compiles to WebAssembly and runs in persistent memory, replicated across independent nodes using Byzantine fault tolerance, so there is no database or file system to connect to, and a misbehaving node, even a "Dr. Evil" one, cannot corrupt the result. Brandon presses on data protection, and Williams points to hardware encapsulation such as AMD SEV-SNP and the ability to choose trusted node providers. He then describes cloud engines, which let an enterprise pick nodes from a marketplace (hyperscalers, independent data centers, or on-prem), reconfigure them without downtime, and avoid vendor lock-in, with payment handled behind the scenes so it looks like a conventional cloud.

On adoption, Williams says data sovereignty is a major driver, citing the U.S. CLOUD Act and governments, such as Pakistan, that want infrastructure they control and can inspect as open source. He describes Caffeine, which builds apps on the Internet Computer from a chat prompt, and Open SaaS, a suite meant to replace siloed SaaS tools with a single AI-aware system. To get started, he recommends pasting the prompt from the skills site into a coding assistant and having it write the back end in Motoko, a language designed for AI agents that guards against data loss when upgrading apps in production. Cloud engine coupons are expected to open up soon.

SHOW: 1070
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1070 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/-H4KS5AMKI8

SHOW SPONSORS:
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NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off

SHOW LINKS
DFINITY Foundation
Internet Computer
OpenCloud (cloud engines)
Internet Computer Skills: Get Started
DFINITY Unveils Open SaaS Vision for AI-Powered Business Software
Caffeine
Motoko programming language
WebAssembly
Apache Cassandra
LinkedIn: thedwilliams
Twitter/X: @dominic_w

GUEST BIO

Dominic Williams is the founder, president, and chief scientist of the DFINITY Foundation, the Zurich-based non-profit behind the Internet Computer, which he began developing in 2015 and launched in 2021. A longtime engineer-entrepreneur focused on distributed systems, he previously founded the MMO game Fight My Monster and served as president and CTO of the Palo Alto incubator String Labs.

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Brandon interviews Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, about his 2013 book *The New Kingmakers* and his recent follow-up, "Agents: The new, New Kingmakers." O'Grady explains that the original thesis was simple: developers had gone from an afterthought in technology purchasing to the group whose choices determined what got used, driven first by open source (the LAMP stack, Linux) and then by cloud services like S3 and EC2 that removed the need to ask for budget. The two discuss why Sun was disrupted from every direction while Oracle and Cisco endured, with O'Grady noting that databases are the stickiest, highest-risk asset in the stack. He recounts getting an early look at GitHub Copilot a year before ChatGPT, but says the late-2025 jump in model capability was a step change he did not foresee.

On software development, O'Grady expects a spectrum rather than a consensus on reviewing AI-written code: toy apps and disposable software may never be read by a human, while medical imaging, aviation, and defense will demand real oversight. He uses his construction background to describe the developer's shift from builder to architect, and warns that the "human in the loop" role is the weak end of the outcomes. Brandon and O'Grady examine why individual developers feel superhuman while organizations don't see the gains, with O'Grady pointing to downstream bottlenecks like the flood of PRs overwhelming open source maintainers. He cites Dr. James Bessen's bank teller research as a reminder that automation's effect on employment is hard to predict, and asks what happens if there is an order of magnitude more software in the world.

On vendors, O'Grady expects both human-facing and agent-only businesses to coexist, with the biggest growth in agents because they scale like cloud, while Brandon points to Cloudflare's rewrite of Wrangler as a model for exposing complete APIs. O'Grady cautions that giving agents the keys to the kingdom is harder than it sounds, since subtle violations (like pulling copyrighted headshots from MLB.com) are harder to foresee than deleting a database. They close with hot takes: O'Grady takes the under on a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity, arguing the industry doesn't draw a bright enough line between digital and physical capability, and he remains skeptical of frontier model valuations and the circular investments behind them, especially as open-weight models close the gap.

SHOW: 1069
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1069 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/E6UFnW40BHQ

SHOW SPONSORS:
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 

SHOW LINKS

The New Kingmakers
Agents: The new, New Kingmakers
Tecosystems Blog
RedMonk
LinkedIn

GUEST BIO

Stephen O'Grady is the principal analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, a developer- and practitioner-focused industry analyst firm. He is the author of *The New Kingmakers* (2013), which argued that developers had become the most important decision-makers in technology, and writes the Tecosystems blog. 

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Brian (@bgracely) and Brandon (@bwhichard) discuss the biggest AI news stories from the second half of September 2026.
Oracle sent a force majeure notice on a major data center build, which Brandon reads as an early signal worth tracking. If other companies follow, it would point to stress in AI infrastructure commitments, and if not, it is a one-off. Brian suggests the industry needs a "Jenga chart" of whose money is propping up whose, with the contractors who actually pour concrete at the base. On the wave of agent launches (Meta's Muse, OpenAI's dots, and OpenClaw Enterprise), they agree that giving everyone a cloud-hosted computer for their agent is a real step toward mainstream adoption. Brian says the unanswered questions are accountability when an agent errs, security controls that don't require dozens of settings, and how people decide what is important enough to keep for themselves. Brandon argues agents should step in at the moment of a task, like filling out a form, rather than needing constant delegation. They also note the move toward soft, cuddly agent branding and the lack of easy ways to share skills across people and teams. The show closes with Meta's hiring of MongoDB's CEO to lead its enterprise push, which Brandon expects to fail because consumer companies start at a deficit in enterprise.

SHOW SPONSORS:
Palo Alto - Secure every identity with Idira by Palo Alto Networks 
NordLayer - Use ENTERPRISE10 for 10% off

SHOW: 1068
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Enterprise AI Show #1068 Transcript
SHOW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/kaNik7LxV3s
SHOW LINKS:
https://theenterpriseaishow.com/

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