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On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"
28 Nov 2025
There are now multiple AI performance engineering agents that use or are trained on my work. Some are helper agents that interpret flame graphs or eBPF metrics, sometimes privately called AI Brendan; others have trained on my work to create a virtual Brendan that claims it can tune everything just like the real thing. These virtual Brendans sound like my brain has been uploaded to the cloud by someone who is now selling it (yikes!). I've been told it's even "easy" to do this thanks to all my publications available to train on: >90 talks, >250 blog posts, >600 open source tools, and >3000 book pages. Are people allowed to sell you, virtually? And am I the first individual engineer to be AI'd? (There is a 30-year-old precedent for this, which I'll get to later.)
This is an emerging subject, with lots of different people, objectives, and money involved. Note that this is a personal post about my opinions, not an official post by my employer, so I won't be discussing internal details about any particular project. I'm also not here to recommend you buy any in particular.
Summary
There are two types :
AI agents . I've sometimes heard them called an AI Brendan because it does Brendan-like things: systems performance recommendations and interpretation of flame graphs and eBPF metrics. There are already several of these and this idea in general should be useful.
Virtual Brendan can refer to something not just built on my work, but trained on my publications to create a virtual me. These would only automate about 15% of what I do as a performance engineer, and will go out of date if I'm not training it to follow industry changes.
Pricing is hard, in-house is easier . With a typical pricing model of $20 per instance per month, customers may just use such an agent on one instance and then copy-and-paste any tuning changes to their entire fleet. There's no practical way to keep tuning changes secret, either. These projects are easier as internal in-house tools.
Some claim a lot but do little . There's no Brendan Gregg benchmark or empirical measurement of my capability, so a company could claim to be selling a virtual Brendan that is nothing more than a dashboard with a few eBPF-based line charts and a flame graph. On some occasions when I've given suggestions to projects, my ideas have been considered too hard or a low priority. Which leads me to believe that some aren't trying to make a good product -- they're in it to make a quick buck.
There's already been one expensive product failure , but I'm not rushing to conclude that the idea is bad and the industry will give up. Other projects already exist.
I’m not currently involved with any of these products .
We need AI to help save the planet from AI . Performance engineering gets harder every year as systems become more complex. With the rising cost of AI datacenters, we need better performance engineering more than ever. We need AI agents that claim a lot and do a lot . I wish the best of luck to those projects that agree with this mantra.
Earlier uses of AI
Before I get into the AI/Virtual Brendans, yes, we've been using AI to help performance engineering for years. Developers have been using coding agents that can help write performant code. And as a performance engineer, I'm already using ChatGPT to save time on...