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"Those memes are not going to make themselves."

Dorota, CEO of Authress, joins us to roast the 2025 DORA Report, which she argues has replaced hard data with an AI-generated narrative. From the confusing disconnect between feeling productive and actually shipping code to the grim reality of a 30% acceptance rate, Warren and Dorota break down why this year's report smells a lot like manure.

We dissect the massive 142-page 2025 DORA Report. Dorota argues that the report, which is now rebranded as the "State of AI-Assisted Software Development", feels less like a scientific study of DevOps performance and more like a narrative written by an intern using an LLM prompt. The duo investigates the "stubborn results" where AI apparently makes everyone feel like a 10x developer, where the hard results tell a different story. AI actually increases software and product instability — failing to improve.

The conversation gets spicy as they debate the "pit of failure" that is feature flags (often used as a crutch for untested code) and the embarrassing reality that GitHub celebrates a mere 30% code acceptance rate as a "success." Dorota suggests that while AI raises the floor for average work, it completely fails when you need to solve complex problems or, you know, actually collaborate with another human being.

In a vivid analogy, Dorota compares reading this year's report to the Swiss Spring phenomenon — the time of year when farmers spray manure, leaving the beautiful landscape smelling...unique. The episode wraps up with a reality check on the physical limits of LLM context windows (more tokens, more problems) and a strong recommendation to ignore the AI hype cycle in favor of a much faster-growing organism: a kitchen countertop oyster mushroom kit.

• AI as an amplifier truism fallacy
• DORA 2025 Report
• DevOps Episode: VS Code & GitHub Copilot
• Where is the deluge of new software - Impact of AI on software products
• Impact of AI on Critical Thinking

• Warren - The Maximum Effective Context Window
• Dorota - Mushroom Grow Kit

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"My biggest legacy at Google is the amount of systems I broke." — Sam Goto joins the show with a name that strikes fear into engineering systems everywhere. As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Chrome team, Sam shares the hilarious reality of having the last name "Goto," which once took down Google's internal URL shortener for four hours simply because he plugged in a new computer.

Sam gets us up to speed with Federated Credentials Management (FedCM), as we dive deep into why authentication has been built despite the browser rather than with it, and why it’s time to move identity from "user-land" to "kernel-land". This shift allows for critical UX improvements for logging in all users irrespective of what login providers you use, finally addressing the "NASCAR flag" problem of infinite login lists.

Most importantly, he shares why you don't need to change your technology stack to get all the benefits of FedCM. Finally, Sam details the "self-sustaining flame" strategy (as opposed to an ecosystem "flamethrower"), revealing how they utilized JavaScript SDKs to migrate massive platforms like Shopify and 50% of the web's login traffic without requiring application developers to rewrite their code.

• HSMs + TPM in production environments
• Get involved: FedCM W3C WG
• The FedCM spec GitHub repo
• TPAC Browser Conference

• Warren - Book: The Platform Revolution
• Sam - The 7 Laws of Identity and Short Story: The Egg By Andy Weir

Share Episode ⸺ Episode Sponsor: Incident.io - https://dev0ps.fyi/incidentio

Elise, VP and Head of UX at Unleash, joins us to talk all about UX. Self identifying as probably "The annoying lady in the room" and a career spanning nearly 30 years—starting before "UX" was even a job title — joins us to dismantle the idea that User Experience is just about moving pixels around. Here we debate the friction between engineering, sales, and the customer. We get to the bottom of whether or avoiding end-user interaction, understand, and research is a career-limiting move for staff+ engineers. Or should you avoid forcing a world-class developer to facilitate a call with a non-technical user if it makes them uncomfortable?

Warren calls out the "Pit of Failure" often faced by teams as they seek to introduce feature flags. They can become a crutch, leading teams to push untested code into production simply because they can toggle it off—a scenario he calls the "pit of failure".

And Elise dives into a great story recounting her consulting days where a company spent a fortune on a branding agency that demanded conflicting "primary colors" for a mainframe application used 8 hours a day. Her low-tech solution to prove them wrong? Listen and find out, this episode is all about bringing UX to Engineering.

• Ladder of Leadership - Book: Turn the Ship Around!

• Warren - Growth.Design Case Studies
• Elise - Paper on Generative UI: LLMs are Effective UI Generators