I've written before about the seasons. They come at you thick and fast and yet at the same time they're slow, daily, quotidian: the way we live, the rhythms of the work we do, our time with our families, our time to enjoy the world around us.

The importance of events, and the events we convene, and the people that we bring together, can’t be overstated, particularly at a time like this, with so many challenges in the world around us. RedMonk is therefore really proud that we can convene the kind of community that we do at Monktoberfest. Stephen, my business partner, does a fantastic job every year bringing people together to learn, share their experiences, and delight in the food and drink of the US Northeast in Autumn. Portland, Maine, as ever, was phenomenally beautiful this year.

At RedMonk we have a deep abiding belief, and even a need, for diversity, equity and inclusion and our events really reflect that. The word "safe space" is overused. Monktoberfest is a safe space.

Monktoberfest is an antidote to some of the excesses of tech bro culture. When people come to Monktoberfest they get a chance to be proud of our industry and the work we do, and the opportunities we create. The curation is pragmatic. There are talks about things like the value of AI, of course, but we also look in other directions:

• Amara Graham's talk on endometriosis, for example, and the fact that doctors don't do enough to support women with this condition

• Talks about supporting students from HBCU colleges and bringing them into open source.

• Talks about not being from around here - the incredible range of place names that define Mainers and their lives and attitudes.

 The beer is, of course, incredible. The food is also great. We therefore have to thank the sponsors that enable us to put on such an event. Sponsors understand that they're supporting meaningful experiences, and we couldn't do it without them. A quick shout-out therefore to a couple of RedMonk conference-sponsoring stalwarts: AWS and Google. Oracle stepped up this year, too. Thank you, Matt Asay. 

Yes of course, it is conference season. We're all beginning to look forward to the holidays and, of course, Amazon re:Invent, bookmarking Thanksgiving and the rest of the holidays to come in December. RedMonk will all be at re:invent. We look forward to seeing you there. We're hosting drinks again with the Duckbill Group and our friends at Heavybit. Here is a link to sign up. Our drink up promises to be the best event of the week - certainly one of the most down-to-earth, being a chance to get off campus at the fantastic storied Atomic Liquors. 

I have to start looking forward to Monki Gras, which is going to be March 11th and 12th in London next year. If you are interested in sponsoring an event that fits some of the characteristics I've described of Monktoberfest, then please contact [email protected]. Or if you're a speaker that wants to find a place, a home, for a talk that you probably wouldn't hear somewhere else, I'm all ears. Ping [email protected].

As we start looking forward to 2026 Wrapped, it's been a great year for us at RedMonk and I hope for all of you too. Like I say we're pragmatic and I think what's become ever clearer is the shape of this ongoing AI revolution. We don't have a crystal ball but things are becoming increasingly clear. This year it became obvious that human review is not going to happen for all the code that we generate. Automated testing and verification are absolutely coming to the fore. We are rethinking the software development lifecycle. The infrastructure that powers software development is fundamentally changing because of agents. Honestly we're kind of privileged to be involved in that cut and thrust. To return to the opening theme, the seasons fly by and that's certainly how it feels in AI right now. The pace of change is furious. Every day there's something exciting to learn and be challenged by. We're dealing with issues now, not just of code, but of philosophy, of meaning. Some in the industry are arguing that LLMs are conscious. We live in interesting times. It is a huge and wondrous and kind of scary time. Again that's why you need people you can trust that are authentic and create spaces where you feel safe. Community -  that's what we're about and always will be.

- James

Links Roundup

In the newsletter we talk about AI and agents remaking infrastructure for the SDLC because of the massive increase in scale. There have been some really interesting links and posts about them lately.

Netlify is building out its Git platform - How we built Git storage for millions of Netlfify customers.

“It turns out Git hosts were doing a lot of valuable heavy lifting. We don’t want to become a Git hosting provider, but we do want every project on Netlify to have the benefits of Git… We’d been accidentally, incrementally rebuilding Git, piece by piece. Our bad.”

Netlify isn’t alone. Chainguard has been struggling with limits of GitHub at scale, so it built its own CI platform, which it has also now rolled out to its customers as a product called Checks.

“Stop waiting on central build queues. Agents and developers run identical checks pre-commit or through the GitHub App, inside warm, Chainguard-hardened microVMs, so every pull request arrives pre-validated”

And when we look at organisations really pushing the limits of source control at scale, Anthropic is right up there - it is now building its own own version control system, Scion, to manage it’s monorep. The numbers in the post are frankly bonkers - it’s well worth a read.

“As our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck. Here, we share how we migrated to an in-house version control system in five months.”

As we say, everything is up for grabs, as the agents keep going geometric with the code they generate, managed by teams delegating more and more work to the robots.

Recent RedMonk Research

• Last month the frontend and mobile dev community sat up when Shopify announced it was moving its mobile apps off React Native and back to Swift and Kotlin. Shopify’s move is one instance of a pattern we at RedMonk have been tracking a lot this year. Large-scale architectural changes that used to be dismissed as too risky or too expensive are getting done, because agents changed the cost of writing new code: Shopify returns to native, and what that says about rewrites in the agentic era. RM clients mentioned: Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Expo

• James Governor posted about an interesting token reduction project at Spotify: The best token is one you don’t use – Spotify on LLM usage as an IO question

• At this year's Dreamforce, Salesforce devoted a good chunk of its keynote to telling customers they might not ever need to log into Salesforce again. See Rachel's recap on Dreamforce 2026 here. RM clients mentioned: Salesforce

• The final post in Kate Holterhoff's series on software registries as trust services looks at Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A), and the overarching question of how software trusts software. RM clients mentioned: AWS, Docker, Google, Salesforce/MuleSoft, and Microsoft/GitHub

• James writes about IBM's latest hot chip: plans to design a single microprocessor architecture that will run both mainframe and ARM instructions. Bringing IBM engineering closer to ARM aligns with the broader industry direction. Despite IBM’s long-standing journey with its own chips, the momentum of ARM in the hyperscaler era is undeniable. (Even) more open mainframes present an interesting trajectory worth keeping an eye on. RM clients mentioned: AWS, IBM, MongoDB and Red Hat

Recent Videos and Media Appearances

• In this RedMonk Quick Take, Kate Holterhoff chats with Samir Sherif, Global Field CISO at Fastly, about Fastly Xcelerate NY.

• 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 (PQC) with Kate Holterhoff: The BOM Explosion & Why PQC Stopped Being 10 Years Away with David Pollak & Allan Friedman

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

• James Governor sits down with Sanjay Sarathy, SVP of Developer Experience at Cloudinary, to discuss developer trust, and why it still matters in the agentic software development era: Sanjay Sarathy on Core Principles of Developer Trust

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

• 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: Inside the AWS Agent Toolkit with Liam Greenamyre

• IBM TechXchange is coming to Atlanta on October 26–29, and RedMonk Senior Analyst Kate Holterhoff is welcoming everyone to her hometown live from the Atlanta Beltline – RedMonk Preview: IBM TechXchange 2026

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

The MonkSignal

One of the things we monks love to do when we travel is get together with our people. If you'd like to get a heads up when one of us is visiting your city, just pick your city (or a city you'll be in) and drop your email in this form.

You'll get a simple email prior to our visit letting you know we'll be in town and when, and if you want to meet with us, catch up over beers or just have a chat, all you have to do is let us know.

Meet the Monks

Events we'll be attending:

• Oracle AI World: 25-28 October 2026, Las Vegas, NV

• IBM TechXchange 2026: 26-29 October 2026, Atlanta, GA

• Github Universe: 28-29 October 2026, San Francisco, CA

• KubeCon NA: 9-11 November 2026, Salt Lake City, UT

• AWS re:Invent: November 30-December 4 2026, Las Vegas, NV

Events we'll be hosting:

• Duckbill/Last Week in AWS + Heavybit + RedMonk at re:Invent 2026: December 2, 2026, Atomic Liquors, Las Vegas, NV

• Monki Gras 2026: 11-12 March 2026, London, UK