Technical Decisions
13 recent decisions
Customer-specific fixes on 10.2 LTS only if every LTS customer wants them - otherwise it is a multi-year branch and breaks bug-for-bug compatibility with RH
Nov 3, 2026 · technical · medium70% confidence
Ryan raised a customer-requested fix for 10.2 LTS that Melissa was advocating. Peter gave the test: if every 10.2 LTS customer wants the fix, do it; if not, it is another branch to maintain for years and very likely not worth it, and doing it means CIQ is no longer bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat - we need to be clear about who we are. He framed it as thinking out loud and said he would support whatever Ryan and the other party agreed.
People: Ryan Smith, Melissa Wood
Sign off on the Fuzzball/Stratum strategy doc while reserving one right - shape the UX so there is one unified experience regardless of what underpins the cluster
Nov 3, 2026 · technical · medium76% confidence
After the 10/30 alignment meeting, Peter skimmed the Fuzzball/Stratum doc while away and gave written sign-off: nominally aligned, no concerns. He reserved the ability to get into the weeds on UX later - how installation options are presented and how admin panels evolve based on what is installed - so there is one unified experience regardless of what underpins the cluster.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Chris Wolford, Jonathon Anderson
CVE automation framing - the goal is zero humans, assume tokens are free to test feasibility, and redesign the flow rather than swap human boxes for automation boxes
Oct 30, 2026 · technical · medium64% confidence
In the 10/29 Nathan 1:1 Nathan said CVE automation is moving too slowly and he will push it at next week onsite, using a 1,000-PRs-a-week, remove-the-humans thought experiment. Peter set the frame his org works from: (1) redesign the whole flow, not replace each human step with an automation step - removing humans changes the flow and leaves about a tenth of the cases as error paths for people; (2) assume tokens and machine time are free for the exercise - if zero-human is unreachable even then, stop; if reachable, then discuss cost; (3) parallel attempts in front of a trusted gate are fine, losers aborted. He called it one of his hot-button issues.
People: Nathan Blackham, Justin Haynes
Desktop agent - define the user experience first; the per-token API is an acceptable starting path and model-integration choices stay open
Oct 30, 2026 · technical · medium68% confidence
At the 10/26 Desktop Brainstorm Greg pushed on definitions and billing (a desktop harness on the API means per-token cost and no Codex or Claude Code subscription use). Peter set the working rule: settle what the agent experience should be first, treat the API as a known-workable path, and do not block on how CIQ interfaces with the model - more options (local harness APIs, routing layers) will open before launch. The experience he described: bring your own agent or key, with granular OS permissions (full disk access yes or no, specific folders) granted up front. He opened by restating the 10/21 decision that stock GNOME is a zero-investment placeholder to be retired and work is not doubled.
People: Greg Kurtzer, Bjorn Hovland, Nathan Blackham
Rocky Linux Pro rename - one disruption, customers told first, structural RLC names stay until there is a value or a problem
Oct 30, 2026 · technical · high73% confidence
Bjorn owned the RLC Pro to Rocky Linux Pro rename and Greg had no objection to Justin convergence doc. Peter set how it executes: Justin 8.10/9.2 convergence changes and the rename ship together so customers absorb one disruption; sales contacts every potentially affected customer first and only then does engineering flip its side (Justin could not action it that morning); structural RLC names (repos, Depot paths, CPEs, bootc and container names) stay as they are; and there is no hard company-wide switch - the public name can slide over a week or two. Jamie Brooks drives the project.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Justin Haynes, Nathan Blackham, Melissa Wood, Jamie Brooks, Greg Kurtzer
Fuzzball plus Stratum - one identity and one pane of glass, no duplicated functionality, Engineering owns the developer experience
Oct 23, 2026 · technical · high74% confidence
At the 10/23 Fuzzball plus Stratum alignment session, Bjorn locked the product split (Fuzzball for R&D, training and research; Stratum for production and inference) and Peter agreed. Peter own calls were architectural invariants: (1) one identity and one set of permissions across both products, with views varying by role and the Stratum UI living within the Fuzzball UI if they coexist; (2) no duplicated functionality - anything both platforms use lives once, in Stratum or in a third shared repo, and Fuzzball reaches through to Stratum hooks; (3) Engineering, not Product, owns the CIQ developer experience of building these products. Process: Jonathon writes the vision for a second review, Wolford draws stock K8s versus Stratum with shared components broken out, Bjorn and Jonathon build an environment by use-case matrix to prune with, and a follow-up next week. Whether Fuzzball requires Stratum stays open between Greg and Bjorn.
People: Bjorn Hovland, Greg Kurtzer, Chris Wolford, Jonathon Anderson, Jason Scott
Qualcomm prototype - present it without letting a days-old prototype lock Engineering architecture
Oct 16, 2026 · technical · medium70% confidence
Before the Qualcomm presentation Peter set a condition for Jonathon Anderson: present the prototype in a way that leaves Engineering free to rearchitect; a prototype built over a few days must not paint CIQ into corners.
People: Jonathon Anderson, Bjorn Hovland
Karl browser tool must run on CIQ infrastructure - licensing it from him is fine, depending on a third-party service is not
Oct 2, 2026 · technical · medium72% confidence
Karl proposed CIQ pay about 20 dollars a month for a browser tool he wrote (reportedly 3.7x cheaper and 3x faster than Claude for agent browsing). Steve declined to decide because Karl was recommending his own product. Peter said the money is irrelevant; what matters is that CIQ runs it on its own infrastructure. CIQ is open to licensing or buying it from Karl if it tests well, but will not take a dependency on an external service. Steve to find out whether the tool predates Karl at CIQ.
People: Steve Wallace, Karl
TPS report falls back to Claude Code when no API key is present - stop paying per run for work a subscription already covers
Oct 1, 2026 · technical · low74% confidence
Ryan TPS GTM summaries failed because the report referenced a hardcoded anthropic-gtm keychain key. Peter found the report was set to API billing rather than an installed Claude Code, kept the existing behavior when the token exists, added a Claude Code fallback when it does not, noted that the current setup pays for every TPS run even when Claude would have done it for free, and pushed the change upstream within about 15 minutes.
People: Ryan Smith
Open-source Sultan diffofdiffs under Apache - routed through Greg open-source gate even though the answer was obvious
Oct 1, 2026 · technical · low72% confidence
When Nathan flagged that Sultan wanted to make the internal diffofdiffs repo public, Peter posted in #distinguished-leaders that Greg wanted to be part of the decision any time anything CIQ was open sourced; this is slightly different (a tool Sultan wrote, used internally), Peter is a giant fan, but wanted Greg plugged in. Greg approved on condition of an Apache license, which Peter relayed to Nathan.
People: Sultan Alsawaf, Greg Kurtzer, Nathan Blackham
Require archival and backup for anything in the Mother Brain warehouse that is not reconstructable from source
Sep 11, 2026 · technical · low66% confidence
While Karl demoed the customer-journey view built on the data warehouse - 15 million events and growing, hosted on GCP - Peter asked how much of it is reconstructable if it is all destroyed. Karl said everything should be recreatable. Peter said he expects that is true and kept the instruction anyway: when Ian is slotted under Wallace, have Ian run archival and backup against anything that is not recreatable. He explicitly excused Karl from doing the work himself.
People: Karl Lowenbjer, Ian, Steve Wallace
Evaluate Aisle AI for CVE discovery and pursue tool access - downgrade the urgency, upgrade the scope
Sep 11, 2026 · technical · medium78% confidence
Greg Kurtzer flagged a ZDNet article in #distinguished-leaders reporting that the AI tool Aisle found six curl vulnerabilities that Mythos and Codex missed. Peter answered Greg immediately that he had not seen it yet and would get the team on it that morning, and in the same window put Nathan Blackham and Justin Haynes on it in a group DM, forwarding the article with the instruction to take a look and be proactive here. About two hours later he came back to Greg with the substantive answer: the CVEs are low severity, CIQ is evaluating whether it can provide an easy fix, and CIQ is working to get access to the tool for future use.
People: Greg Kurtzer, Nathan Blackham, Justin Haynes
Pull Max Spevack Spark work into a CIQ-managed repository before the announcement, and define the outbound publication path
Sep 11, 2026 · technical · medium79% confidence
In the group DM with Nathan Blackham and Brett Mastbergen on Sept 9, Peter pointed at Max Spevack NVIDIA Spark work living at github.com/maxspevack/spark-rocky, noted Brett already has access, and said he would like to get it pulled into a CIQ managed repository, asking one of them to make that happen. He paired that with a request to talk about a process for making it available to the world on the heels of the announcement Lindsay Aamodt wants to make in the coming week or so. He did not route the request through Max. In the same window he told Brett he would try to chat with Max but that Max can be hard to reach currently, and told Lindsay and Bjorn that Max is so hit-miss on getting back to him on things like the benchmark publication.
People: Max Spevack, Nathan Blackham, Brett Mastbergen, Lindsay Aamodt