An internal memo dispatched by senior execs at Red Hat suggests the software biz is starting to push AI tooling within its Global Engineering department. RHEL may be about to get some Windows 11-style “improvements.”
It carries the heading “Engineering that’s evolved and amplified for the AI era,” and for any AI skeptics in the developer teams at Red Hat, the tone of the email may raise alarm bells. The times are changing, it states.
That is unfortunate. I don’t like everything about Redhat’s products, but they do have some very useful tools.
The real concern here is that they intend to push velocity. Senior devs are already struggling to keep up with vetting these velocitized changes and are sending out warnings that quality and security will suffer. IMO the tech isn’t mature enough to run unsupervised and transforming senior devs into code reviewers is a big mistake.
Can the Ai just use rust?
you just add “do not put bugs in the code. review it as much as you need to.” to the prompt.
Duh, it’s run by IBM. The most brain-rotted management suite on earth. All they do is chase the cool new hotness, and unfortunately it works for them – they’re mostly selling to other brain-rotted manager types. (The end users, as usual, get hosed.)
IBM like Apple has been cautious about generative AI Not to say they don’t, their Granite models work great for personal machines.
Choice is always key, embedding it in the OS is a terrible idea.
For some reason I thought IBM didn’t exist anymore lol. What a horrible day to find out they do.
They exited the PC market a while back. They still make enterprise stuff.
They own Red Hat and IIRC, it’s their fastest growing (if not largest) business unit.
It’s like they don’t understand the reason for this success is how different their road taken has been compared to all-in on AI companies.
I bet they’re just using GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Big whoop. lol
It then continues to largely repeat the same point, complete with explaining the same initialism again: “We are transitioning to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). AI will be the operating model we run on. This is not about ‘speeding up old processes’; it is about a world-class, agent-first development model fundamentally increasing the volume and quality of what we ship.”
We feel obliged to note that such repetition can be a sign of text that was generated by an LLM, leading us to suspect that the authors may have used such a tool. As we reported from the CentOS Connect conference last month, we sat behind a Red Hatter doing just that in a message to an email distribution list.
While “our commitment to open source and upstream is not changing,” the execs admit that “product and project development processes may diverge initially as we focus on how we build and deliver our products.” Red Hat will try to “influence community development processes such that our processes can converge over time.” It is possible this means the company might attempt to get external development communities to adopt similar practices – and that the authors anticipate significant resistance and even pushback from some communities.
Cooooool 😐
“Our roles: All Global Engineering roles will evolve. The focus will shift from ‘AI as a tool used on occasion’ to ‘AI automation as a way to scale the delivery of value to customers.’ Our associates’ skillsets will grow as they become proficient in these tools.”
The “scale the delivery of value to customer” phrase is a massive red flag, it means they have no fucking clue what they are doing. If they did, they would be more clear about their thinking and reasoning and not use PR speak.
They do provide some more specifics that are quoted later in the article, but it still sounds like they haven’t really thought this through:
The next few paragraphs of the memo are oddly repetitive. First, it says: “To lead in this era, we must evolve our operating model. The gap we face today isn’t just technical – it’s organizational. Today, we are beginning our transition to an Agentic Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) to transform how Global Engineering and Products deliver.”
“‘All-in’ product scope: We aren’t looking for a single scrum team to experiment in a vacuum. To avoid bottlenecks, we will move entire products or sub-products to this model simultaneously.” Scrum is a reference to the Agile development model, about which The Register’s Rupert Goodwins expressed reservations back in 2024.
What’s not clear about “delivering value to customers”? I think it is very specific to [product] that [company] delivers!
“Value” is a term so ambiguous, it’s actually worse than not saying anything.
There’s some value in your words here! 👍
“We will move entire products to this model simultaneously” ah yes, the All-in strategy that’s very safe and prudent like in poker… And yes, the rest of the memo sounds like the usual marketing team and execs auto-fellating each other, to the dismay of everyone else.
Anyone surprised that enterprise software is doing this?
How long until they get more hate than Canonical?
Hopefully it’s just AI tools for development they’re talking about (though that will be bad enough if RHEL becomes vibecoded slop) and not stupid AI “features” baked into the OS.
I think the inverse might actually be preferable. If there’s slop in the code base, that will be harder to avoid than whole modules that you can just not install.
While neither is preferable, putting it in the development is more insidious.
