# Kate Holterhoff of RedMonk: AI slop, agent experience, and the open source crisis

> Kate Holterhoff, senior analyst at RedMonk, traces a distinctly non-linear path — from painting murals in Cincinnati and earning a literature PhD at Carnegie Mellon, to a postdoc at Georgia Tech, front-end engineering, and four years as one of the only industry analysts covering the top of the stack. She and Victoria Melnikova dig into what a developer-focused analyst firm actually does, how AI is forcing every consulting business to rethink its value, and the open source crisis Kate has been documenting: AI slop drowning maintainers in low-quality PRs, reviewing rather than coding as the real bottleneck, projects like tldraw and Ladybird closing to outside contributions, and supply chain worms like Mini Shai-Hulud that hit TanStack. They also cover agent experience as the new discovery layer for dev tools, the security tradeoffs of opening the aperture to non-developers, Kate's favorite tools in 2026, and RedMonk's community-first culture around Monktoberfest and Monki Gras.

- URL: https://evilmartians.com/events/kate-holterhoff-redmonk
- Date: 2026-07-13T00:00:00.000Z
- Conference: Dev Propulsion Labs
- Speakers: Victoria Melnikova
- Event website: /devpropulsionlabs
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN57gcJLgU8