Cortex

Mission Control for the AI Software Factory | The Engineering Operations Platform trusted by world-class organizations.

(@ycombinator W20)

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

👀 The video speaks for itself, but the blog has so much more!

Check out the blog to learn what we have planned next. ⤵

https://t.co/h3j8ykk5fR

[Derek Devicemanager @IT_unhinged]

Security called me at 6:12 AM today.

"Patch every PHP server immediately."

I asked what happened.

"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."

Cool.

How many PHP servers do we have?

According to inventory: 12

According to reality:

Nobody knows.

We found one running WordPress.

Three running old internal tools.

One under someone's desk.

Two inside vendor appliances.

A forgotten employee directory from 2016.

And a server named:

PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH

Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.

Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.

I asked who owned it.

The documentation said:

BRIAN.

Brian left in 2019.

We called Brian.

He said:

"Oh wow, that's still running?"

Excellent.

By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.

CEO:

"Can hackers actually get in?"

Security:

"Potentially yes."

CEO:

"Without a password?"

Security:

"Yes."

CEO:

"Then why do WE need passwords?"

Not the lesson.

Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.

Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.

Finance asked for a cost comparison.

At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.

Marketing refused.

"Our campaign is live."

So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.

We finally patched everything we could find.

Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.

Hostname:

TEMP-PHP-2014

Uptime:

4,512 days.

Nobody knows what it does.

Nobody owns it.

Nobody can shut it down.

But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.

Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.

It is running PHP 5.4.

The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.

The emergency patch took four hours.

Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.

The internet isn't held together with code.

It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Every org rolling out coding agents has to build or buy a software factory. We built ours and open-sourced it.

engrams runs Claude Code, Codex, or your own agent in a microVM on your infra.

Our CTO and Chief Architect walk through it live Nov 10, 9am PT: https://t.co/OoJRZvEJFJ

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

The hardest part of engineering is everything around the code, and AI is making it harder. Our job is to stay close to the leaders who deal with that every day. Grateful this review on G2 picked up on it.
https://t.co/VtK8zOrq7C

[Anish Dhar @dharosaurus]

Today at @GetCortexApp we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing engrams (https://t.co/YICb4NYBhL) - our self hosted, software factory built for enterprise needs. It’s a bring-your-own-harness alternative to Devin (by @cognition ) and @FactoryAI - you get 80% of the value with 100% less of the drama ( iykyk 😂 ).

What does engrams do and why should enterprises care?

Engrams is exactly what you’d expect from an ADE / software factory platform like Devin, Factory, Ramp’s inspect, etc – except it’s fully open source.

It’s the most powerful open source factory available in the market today. It has: 

- long-lived, space-efficient, compute-efficient sandboxing/VMs for agents w/ credential brokering for secrets
- embedded browser for human or agent use and preview environments
- native IDE in every session
- automations framework
- slack integration
- LLM gateway support
- multi-player mode
- harness-agnostic artifact sharing
- so much more

Enterprises care about cloud-agent software factories to manage risk, they want to avoid being locked into one lab like Anthropic or OpenAI. Engrams enables lets you be not just model agnostic, but *harness* agnostic as well – bring Claude Code, Codex, or any other harness you want!

This seems too good to be true, why is Cortex open sourcing something that we’ve seen enterprises pay 7-8 figures for? Why not sell it as a product?

Our belief is that in many cases the harness / ADE layer is going to be very quickly commoditized. Companies like Ramp are building their own. Both building and buying is leading to the exact same product capabilities.

What we believe will be more important than ever is the AI governance and adoption layer. It’s easy to generate code but building an engineering org that can actually deploy and operate it in confidence is the hard part. It’s easy to “build an agent” but safely deploy it in your SDLC and ensuring it has the right context and governance to meet your standards is the hard part. 

This is where the Cortex platform comes in – if you care about governance, quality, cost, and building a great engineering org, that’s when we make money. Not by selling tokens as a commodity. We hope to be a part of your journey with Engrams as you build your AI native SDLC.

We announced this at Evolve and several of our larger enterprise customers are currently working on migrating from other software factories - which will save them 6-7 figures on average in the migration. We’re happy to help you with this - reach out to me directly!

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

New Feature Friday: arrays of primitives in Workflow User Inputs.

Get the array your workflow needs, without the object (or the transformation step) in the way.

Solution Architect Jeff Schnitter has the walkthrough.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Every reliability dashboard hits the same wall: zoom into the metric that's breaking, and the rest of the system disappears from view. KPI cards in Engineering Intelligence fix that. Compact cards for what's steady, full-size charts for what's not.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Most search bars are just filtered lists. We rebuilt Catalog search into a real query language: Boolean operators, autocomplete, and automatic fallback suggestions when your query comes up empty. Feature Friday demo from Keith Zeto (Lead Platform Engineer):

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

New in Engineering Intelligence: enhanced filters.

Exclude values, catch nulls, wildcard match, filter by PR size or cycle time, drop weekends from time ranges, and set scope once at the dashboard level.

Christine Byun walks through it for this week's Feature Friday:

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

The World Cup is down to the final two and so is Cortex's Coming Home Dashboard.

This #NewFeatureFriday, Cristina walks through tabular views (now in public beta) for tracking scorecards and operational maturity across services.

Reach out to your CSM to try it.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Cortex Scorecards + DRIVE: know your engineering org's health, not just its output.

With bronze/silver/gold scorecards for delivery, reliability, initiatives, vigilance, and efficiency.

Docs: https://t.co/DVvuyJ25c3

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

GitHub rule sets are now supported in Cortex scorecards. And your existing branch protection rules? Already covered.

Watch this week's Feature Friday 👇

#NewFeatureFriday #GitHub

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

AI is producing code faster than engineering orgs can absorb it.

Today we're releasing DRIVE: a framework that measures whether your org can actually keep up, across delivery, reliability, initiatives, vigilance, and efficiency.

Take the assessment: https://t.co/VrZOtUlEU9

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Happy Feature Friday!

We just dropped Data Explorer with Tabular View in beta.

Compare metrics side by side, pull in scorecard data alongside your time series, and we tracked the World Cup with it.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Cortex Scorecards + Datadog: know exactly which services are production ready, and which aren't.

Senior Engineer Douglas Cooper walks through linking Datadog to Cortex and turning production readiness from a question into a checklist.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

NYC for DASH? Or just in NYC?

Cortex + Spacelift + Infisical happy hour, Tuesday June 9th, 6:30 PM at our office rooftop.

RSVP: https://t.co/XgyTzTQbk7

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

If you're in London for LeadDev this week, come decompress with us.

Cortex and https://t.co/3XkeviNavu are hosting a proper off-call night at Old Street Tavern on Tuesday, June 2 at 6pm.

Space is limited. Grab your spot: https://t.co/MKeAQMI58A

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Your CI pipeline can now trigger Cortex Workflows directly.

No UI, no manual step.

Workflows Run API is in beta.

Cortex CLI v1.15.0+, pass context via JSON, run sync or async.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

We outgrew our own conference. IDPCON is now EVOLVE.

Join us on Sept 24, 2026, in NYC for operator-led talks on production readiness, AI adoption, reliability at scale.

Apply to attend: https://t.co/AkxKh2SzAb

#EVOLVE2026

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Feature Friday:

Our Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through the new All Scorecards report.

See AI maturity, production readiness, incident prep, and every other scorecard side by side. Group by team or domain. Drill from heat map to a failing rule.

[Cortex @GetCortexApp]

Every team ships feature flags. Nobody owns the cleanup.

Our VP of Product Kara Gillis used the Cortex AI Assistant in Slack to triage nearly 100 of our own LaunchDarkly flags: candidates for removal, flags needing review, a prioritized cleanup list.