Leaked memo suggests Red Hat's chugging the AI Kool-Aid

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.)

"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.

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.

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 😐

How long until they get more hate than Canonical?

Anyone surprised that enterprise software is doing this?

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 bet they're just using GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Big whoop. lol

Ugh. Come for the systemd, stay for the slop.

That is unfortunate. I don't like everything about Redhat's products, but they do have some very useful tools.

What more would you expect of an IBM subsidiary?