The CAFE(S) framework: Improving AI agent effectiveness

Meta researcher Moritz Beller joins Brian Houck to discuss how Meta measures developer productivity. Moritz explains diff authoring time and how Meta uses it to evaluate tools and guide engineering decisions. They explore how AI is changing engineers’ work and revealing gaps in traditional metrics. They also revisit Moritz’s “Mind the Gap” study and discuss the promise and risks of AI agents for testing.

In this episode of Engineering Enablement, Robert Lucero, Chief Architect at Okta, joins host Brian Houck to discuss how agentic AI is changing identity and access management. They explore how organizations should define agent identities, why authentication and authorization remain foundational, and how sandboxing, fine-grained permissions, and just-in-time access can enable agents to operate autonomously without creating unacceptable risk. Robert shares what Okta has learned from driving AI adoption among security-minded engineers, what makes a repository ready for AI agents, and why strong testing, CI, and review processes matter even more as AI generates more code. They also discuss AI’s role in software validation, the need for human judgment, and whether AI will ultimately give the advantage to security teams or attackers.

Max Kanat-Alexander is an Executive Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, where he helps lead developer experience and AI-assisted software development. In this episode of Engineering Enablement, Max joins Brian Houck to discuss how AI is changing software development and why strong engineering fundamentals matter more than ever. They explore how engineering skills are evolving, why AI can amplify weaknesses in the development lifecycle, and how teams should rethink code review, quality, and testing. Max also shares how leaders can assess whether their organizations are ready for more advanced AI workflows and why developing the next generation of senior engineers remains one of the biggest open questions in software engineering.

AI adoption among software developers is approaching 100%, AI-authored code now makes up more than half of merged code, and developers report saving more time with AI every quarter. But those gains aren’t translating evenly into better outcomes. In this episode of Engineering Enablement, host Brian Houck, Distinguished Scientist at DX, sits down with Justin Reock, Deputy CTO at DX, to unpack findings from DX’s latest AI Impact Report. They explore where AI is improving engineering velocity and developer experience, where concerns are emerging around PR size, change confidence, and failure rates, and why rising AI spend has yet to produce a comparable increase in innovation. They also discuss how AI is changing the meaning of code maintainability and where developers’ AI-driven time savings may actually be going.

Tim Bozarth is a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft CoreAI, where he leads engineering for next-generation developer experiences and Microsoft's Engineering Thrive initiative. Throughout his career at Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and Box, he has focused on developer productivity, engineering systems, and organizational effectiveness. In this episode of Engineering Enablement, Tim joins host Brian Houck to discuss Engineering Thrive, Microsoft's framework for measuring and improving engineering productivity. They explore why AI makes outcome-based metrics more important than ever, where new bottlenecks are emerging in the software development lifecycle, and why verification and confidence may become more valuable than code generation itself. Tim also shares why the purpose of engineering remains the same despite rising levels of abstraction, the skills that remain durable in an AI-driven world, and why engineering leaders should focus on outcomes rather than activity metrics.