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Willem Pienaar

Willem Pienaar

5 posts

Our LLM judge scored worse than chance until we made it compare

Willem Pienaar Peter Richens
25 mins July 23, 2026

We rank an agent's investigation traces by comparing them in pairs and turning the wins into an Elo score. Grading each trace on its own scored worse than chance. Comparison made the ranking work, and it catches regressions our other evals miss.

Our LLM judge scored worse than chance until we made it compare

Why Your AI SRE Needs Memory

Willem Pienaar Shahram Anver
8 mins March 19, 2026

Investigation logic is becoming a commodity. What won’t commoditize is operational memory: the ability to capture and persist engineering judgment.

Why Your AI SRE Needs Memory

Cleric Named a Cool Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in AI for SRE and Observability

Shahram Anver Willem Pienaar
5 mins November 12, 2025

We’ve been named a Cool Vendor in the 2025 Gartner Cool Vendors in AI for SRE and Observability report. We see this as validation of our approach to building a self-improving AI SRE.

Cleric Named a Cool Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in AI for SRE and Observability

What is an AI SRE?

Willem Pienaar
16 mins December 12, 2024

Engineering teams are deploying AI agents to handle production operations. This deep dive shows how AI SREs work: building system understanding, investigating issues, and driving resolution. You’ll learn their current capabilities and limitations, and how they will change the way engineering teams operate.

What is an AI SRE?

Introducing Cleric: The first autonomous AI site reliability engineer

Shahram Anver Willem Pienaar
4 mins March 21, 2024

We’re excited to announce that we’re building an autonomous AI SRE, called Cleric, backed by Zetta Venture Partners in a $4.3M seed round. Cleric is an AI teammate designed to autonomously manage, optimize, and heal software infrastructure.

Introducing Cleric: The first autonomous AI site reliability engineer

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