AI broke traditional infra - with Kyle from Depot.dev @ AIE Europe

Hi, everyone. We're AI Engineers, and I'm joined today by Kyle from Depot. Hey, Kyle. Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here. This is, quite the event. I think this is the first one in Europe. And Yes.

Well, I think there was a, like, kind of There's one in here. Ours. Yeah. In your your neck of the woods.

Mhmm. So what are you, what are you excited about at the moment? What's, yeah. So we we just released Depot CI.

I think that was two weeks ago, and the response has been off the charts. Everybody's moving, their GitHub actions workflows over to Depot CI. So DevTools CI is our own CI engine that we've built from the ground up. Really, it's like the CI engine we've wanted from the very beginning.

And the best way to think about it is it supports different languages effectively. So the first syntax it speaks is GitHub Actions, obviously, because that's what we're most familiar with nowadays. But, like, we're building our own SDK for it so you'll be able to, like, write your own TypeScript code or Python code to, like, orchestrate your pipelines. The entire system is built on top of our own sandbox tech, and we're working on, like, exposing the lower level details of that.

But, yeah, really, like, being here at this conference and kinda, like, seeing the current state of coding agents, and, really, we've made this, like, step function leap in what agents can do. And we're starting to think a lot more about, like, what's the new paradigm for how engineers and agents need to collaborate and, like, what's the right tools and right infrastructure components that we need to do that at scale. Yeah. And I've seen you guys do getting a lot of attention.

I was watching one of Fia's videos that was, like, that Sunil shared, and I was watching it, and then, hey. I see. Yeah. Like, you guys popped up as well.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're definitely, it's wild to, like, be in this place now, like, three years later and be like, I was just at a conference.

I was at KubeCon, back in Amsterdam, and I think a 100 people, like, walked up to me and were like, oh, yeah. Like, I've heard of Debooted. I'm like, this thing or that thing or this other thing or, like, I've seen your stuff on Twitter or seen your stuff on LinkedIn. Yeah.

To, like, go through that journey as a startup and be at that state now with Depot is, is wild for sure. Yeah. One of the things I really wanted to ask you because I think, with Depot, you have, like, I think a lot of you have a really, like, strong view into people's development flow and, like, what they're actually doing, how they're building things. What you know, things are changing a lot.

What are you, what are you seeing in, like, the way people are changing, how they write code, and how they deploy it? And Yeah. I think it's kinda like saying water is wet, in 2026, but, like, DevTools growth rate has more than doubled in the past three months. And that to be clear, right, that's growth rate has doubled.

So it's the growth rate. Growing I I I'm making these numbers off. If you were growing at 10%, you're now growing at 20%. Yeah.

That's what yeah. And that's across everything. So that's across revenue. That's across product usage.

You know, I was just in a meeting this week here in London where somebody was asking me, like, how much of that can be attributed to, like, AI and agents? And then our response was, like, literally all of it. And, like, the explosion of code is real. It is happening.

And we're seeing it across all digital customers. Like, everybody is facing what has, like, always been the bottleneck, which is, like, really all of your infrastructure tools. So, like, source control, CICD, like, tests, pull requests, like, all of those things have always been a bottleneck in various different ways. And now they're just, like, crumbling under this new load, right, where it's like, what do we do when there's 10,000 agents on a 10 person engineering team producing, like, 10 x the amount of code that now needs to be reviewed?

What do we do when there's, like, 10 x the amount of code, like, flowing into source control and GitHub is struggling to keep one nine of reliability. Right? And all of these things are, like, ripe for disruption. Like, how do you handle this new world?

And nobody has the answer, by the way. Like, I don't have the answer. Git doesn't have the answer. Git Butler doesn't have the answer.

Like, everybody's trying to figure this out. But it's very clear that, like, the volume of code has turned up exponentially, and we're trying to figure out, like, how do we manage the quality of it? Like, how do we build solid infrastructure primitives, like source control underneath, NCI, ACD providers that can really, like, support that load at scale. Interesting.

Okay. And then how do you think like, what's what's going wrong for developers now, and what needs to go right? I think what's going wrong for developers right now is just really, like, the tools and systems that we've been using for the past twenty years aren't built for this new world that we're living in. Either, like, the fundamental, like, collaboration paradigm is, like, wrong with them because they were built around this concept of a human needs to be involved at every step, and that's just simply not true anymore, to like, the actual tools themselves can't handle this new load.

Right? They are literally falling over daily, as we sit today. And we need better tools. We need better primitives.

We need a different paradigm, and that's what we see with depot. That's why so many people were hungry to, like, switch to depot CI is because the existing status quo around GitHub Actions, even with Depot's own GitHub Action runners, like, we only owned, like, 30% of the pipeline with those runners. Right? Like, 70% is still with GitHub.

And so there's only so much we could do to, like, accelerate that and, like, make that stable. And bringing Depot c Depot CI online is really, like, us taking over a 100% of the pipeline. So, like, now it's our engine. It's our control plane.

It's everything. And people want that people want to like reliable tools. They want reliable infrastructure, that can also like serve not only their engineering team, but like all of the agents that are spinning up locally or inside of cloud environments and stuff like that. Okay.

And what are you excited about, for the future of deco? We're working on a lot of cool stuff. I think DPO CI is definitely in its early days. There's a lot of things that we wanna add to that.

We definitely want to explore, like, how can we do more things open source. So this idea of, like, Depot CI can support different syntaxes. Like, how can we make that a pluggable system that's open source so that if you wanna bring CircleCI pipelines or you wanna build bring your Jenkins pipelines or things like that, like, how can Depot CI support that in a community led way? Also, like, where can we go beyond this?

Right? How can we offer, like, the depot level of infrastructure performance all the way down to the source control layer? And so for us, like, we're thinking a lot about source control, CICD, obviously, with Depot CI, code review. But, ultimately, like, what is that collaboration paradigm that we need for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, for a world where a team of five engineers is operating like a team of 500 engineers once you, like, augment them with agents at their side as well.

K. Amazing. One last side question. You're from The States originally, living in France.

We're here in London for Air Engineer Europe. What are you making of, like, the European tech scene and the differences, the the strengths, the weaknesses? Yeah. No.

It's a really good question. I get that question fairly frequently, as an expat living in France. The best way I can answer it is really, like, London feels like a hub for tech. I would say France less so, especially in the South Of France.

South Of France has its own, its own culture, its own speed. Sometimes there's some friction there for me personally of, like, I don't I don't like that slowness. But every time I come up here to London, it's like, yeah, this feels like a hub. And I think part of that is, like, historically, it's, like, been a financial hub as well.

And so that's carrying over into, like, becoming a tech hub as well. But, like, I've also been to Berlin and Barcelona and things like that and and Amsterdam recently as well. And those those places feel like hubs as well. Like, it feels like there's something rising up here in Europe.

And I think, like, it was presented maybe in today's keynote or yesterday's keynote of, like, no. No. No. Like, all of this, like, AI research and all of the, like, advancements we're making with LLMs is coming out of, like, research that's happening here.

Right? It's happening in Berlin. It's happening in London. It's happening, really, like, all across the EU and The UK that really feels like you're you're living in something that's it's gaining ground.

It's gaining traction. Sure. It might not, like, be a 100% like San Francisco, but San Francisco has its own hub of things that they're focused on, and it also has its own downsides as well. And so I think it's an exciting time to be living over here and, like, still be, living in this world of new technology.

Yeah. Amazing. Where where do you wanna send people? Yeah.

I mean, like, go check out devtools.dev. Obviously, I'm on Twitter as well, or X or whatever they call it nowadays. Just Kyle Galbraith.

And, yeah, check us out. Amazing. Cool. Thanks, Kyle.

Awesome. Thank you.