Boris Tane - Polylane

This week we're joined by Boris Tane, founder of Polylane and previously founder of Baselime, the observability startup Cloudflare acquired in 2024, where he went on to lead Workers observability. Polylane builds a live topology map across your cloud, observability tools, and repos so an agent can detect, investigate, and fix production issues before anyone gets paged. We talk about why bolted-on AI tools fail for on-call, how Polylane's memory systems work, using trajectory analysis to vet pull requests before they merge, and what happens to the on-call rotation as agents write more of our code. https://polylane.com https://boristane.com https://x.com/boristane https://boristane.com/blog/on-call-is-now-theatre/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2024/cloudflare-enters-observability-market-with-acquisition-baselime/ https://www.openstatus.dev 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:07 Boris's Path from Aerospace 00:06:44 Scale and Agents at Cloudflare 00:13:09 Why Bolt-On Tools Fail 00:17:15 Ad 00:18:19 Onboarding and Topology Discovery 00:21:20 Memory Systems for Agents 00:27:19 Trajectory Analysis for Pull Requests 00:33:06 Auto-Merging and Review Trust 00:38:51 Preview Environments and Feature Flags 00:44:58 Status Pages and External Outages 00:47:35 The Future of On-Call Work 00:51:13 Uneven Future and Wrap-Up Full show notes and transcript: https://devtools.fm/episode/179