Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last year was the year of AI code generation. This year is everything that comes after: validation, quality, and making sure what gets built actually ships. Nobody's better positioned to talk about that than CircleCI, and in this episode of Peer Review, CFO Blake Buisson and CMO Chitra Balasubramanian dig into what that moment means for the company and the people building it.

Seven years of institutional knowledge meets a fresh outside perspective in this episode of Peer Review. June Ko is CircleCI's Chief Legal Officer. Judson Griffin is the Chief Revenue Officer. They cover what tenure without complacency actually looks like, why boomerang hires keep happening across every region and role, and what it means to be in the middle of a market moment most people won't recognize until it's already passed. Judson's advice: get in front of the rocket and hold on. June's take: being uncomfortable is the new normal, so you might as well get good at it.

Jim Rose and Rob Zuber have been working together since 2011. By now they can plan a quarter with hand signals. But this episode of Peer Review isn't about how well they know each other. It's about what they're still figuring out. CircleCI's CEO and CTO sit down to talk about what they've always believed about software delivery (it's about outcomes, not craft), how the pace of change has forced them back into the trenches of actually building, and what it means to lead a technical organization when the state of the art is shifting faster than any pitch deck can keep up with.

There's a risk window after a malicious package is published when nobody knows it's there. Scanners alone can't close that window.

Everyone keeps saying we don't need junior engineers anymore. This episode makes the case that's exactly wrong. Rob sits down with two CircleCI colleagues at opposite ends of the experience spectrum: Hanabel Mengistu, a new grad less than a year into her first engineering role, and Michael Webster, who has been writing software professionally since 2012. Together they explore what it actually feels like to enter the industry right now, when AI has reshuffled the deck for everyone.

Every dependency security program needs a way to handle packages that have a valid business reason to stay in use despite a CVE or license issue. Ideal exception processes give developers full context upfront, including safer alternatives, then route real requests to a security team that weighs the risk profile and logs who requested it, who approved it, and for how long. Get the friction wrong in either direction and the process fails: too much and developers route around it, too little and it becomes the default path.

We intentionally introduced a bug into our app to see what would happen. The agent used the CircleCI MCP Server to detect the failed pipeline, diagnose the issue from the build logs, implement a fix, and keep iterating until CI was green.