
Cofounder & CTO @GetCortexApp // vegan 🌱 // San Diego
Joined March 2014
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Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble but (as always) the agent/MCP story isn’t black and white. If you think it is, sorry,you’re not a serious person. If you believe that AI is a productivity booster, then you must believe any level of AI diffusion across an org has nonzero value. 🧵
Ganesh Datta retweeted
Yep, people are surprised to learn this but it’s the truth. And for many enterprises they are actually still struggling with rolling out coding agents.
Why? Well it turns out adoption of AI is more of a change management problem at scale vs technical one. How do you roll out coding agents across 5k+ users in a way that doesn’t mess up one of cost, speed, or quality?
Many enterprises are realizing they dropped millions on these tools and did NOT see the impact on metrics they were hoping.
Does that mean coding agents === scam. No absolutely not. Any founder will tell you that their best engineers have become even more effective due to AI. The 10x Eng becomes 100x and I’ve seen it happen.
But it turns out giving a coding agent to an engineer who was mediocre or an engineering team with weak foundation exposes it even faster. So now imagine at enterprise scale….. your PR throughput 5x but so did your MTTR and vulnerability across services.
This is btw why you are seeing the labs invest big time in FDE models. They all realized that AI transformation is not unlike the on-prem to cloud movement that has taken more than a decade. It will take time but will eventually unlock billions in enterprise value
Ganesh Datta retweeted
Today at @GetCortexApp we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing engrams (engramsfactory.com/) - 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!
Also supported in our open source factory, engrams – github.com/cortexapps/engram…
Ganesh Datta retweeted
1) Not commenting on the drama between @FactoryAI and @cognition (enough has been said lol) but as a founder of a dev tools company who shares several enterprise customers with them I wanted to share why so many here in tech twitter don’t see them / hear about them yet they have insane rev growth
Ganesh Datta retweeted
This one got to me
Perhaps because he’s not an anon, but the favorite to win statewide office in Texas.
Perhaps it’s because the kids in the picture could have been me 25 years ago.
I just donated to his opponent and hope you’ll join me
secure.actblue.com/donate/ro…
lots of folks who just raised a seed round giving advice like they've been building for 10 years. applies generally but take a look at where the advice is coming from before treating it seriously.
esp dangerous when it comes from folks with big audiences
Realistically, it’s probably both, within the same org.
The sooner we stop hyperbolizing things the sooner we raise the floor of AI adoption.
Try changing behavior across thousands of employees. You know what’s easier? Meeting people where they work.
With AI maybe that’s through an MCP/CLI into their coding agent/cowork/meta harness. Maybe it’s through agents in whatever tools they use daily.
Every employee isn’t using your *meta harness company brain knowledge graph neural center* tomorrow. Some people might, and maybe that’ll get widespread adoption eventually.
Everyone’s going to learn old lessons the hard way - changing behavior is HARD.
They do get it - and we’re just not their target audience. In the enterprise, getting MCP access authorized for a tool is incredibly difficult. They don’t have unlimited frontier model access. X is an echo chamber. In-app agents are a huge boon for enterprise adopters.
The chances of @CBS picking 5 random Cupertinians and none of them being Asian is 0.28%.
The city of Cupertino is 70.9% Asian. A new TV show set there ignores this. sfgate.com/sf-culture/articl…
can we all agree to move on from the "AI ROI" obsession for coding agents? we *know* they help us ship more - realizing ROI just a matter of aiming that firepower on the right things.












