Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience & the open source crisis | Evil Martians

Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk (https://redmonk.com/), sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about what AI is doing to open source, developer tools, and the analyst business itself. She also shares her winding path to the role: painting murals in Cincinnati, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D., a decade in academia, and frontend engineering before joining the industry's only developer-focused analyst firm. Kate explains why open source maintainers are calling this moment a crisis — code is cheap, review is the bottleneck, and projects like tldraw and Ladybird have stopped accepting external PRs entirely. She shares why agent experience is the new front door for dev tools discovery (and why your docs are now your funnel), how vibe coding is pulling non-developers into dependency decisions that keep CISOs up at night, and why she believes design will be the differentiator that separates the vibe coders from the pack.