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Developers don’t seek products––they seek immediate solutions to specific problems. When facing technical hurdles, developers typically scan documentation quickly, evaluating potential solutions in moments. Effective developer tools must provide immediate clarity, ease of use, and instant demonstrable value.
During my time as the Director of Product at Cloudinary, where I led product experience strategies for a community of over 1.5 million developers, I witnessed firsthand that tools without an immediate “aha moment” simply couldn’t gain traction—no matter how powerful their underlying technology.
Great developer tools prove their worth in minutes, not days. Below, I’ll walk through how we’ve revolutionized container security with agentic AI that delivers real value in just 180 seconds.
The Developer Experience Problem in Container Security
Today, most container security tools fail because they disrupt developer workflows. Developers are forced into tedious vulnerability scanning, manual remediation, and complex OS migrations, creating resistance and hindering productivity.
Traditional container vulnerability management requires developers to face cumbersome “lift and shift” processes, migrating entire applications to new operating systems to address single vulnerabilities. This friction-filled cycle can span weeks or months, drastically slowing momentum.
A truly developer-native solution must work within existing environments, operating directly on current container images, eliminating migration headaches and maintaining workflows.
How Agentic AI Transforms Remediation
This is where agentic AI transforms the process. Root’s patent-pending AVR technology uses an intelligent AI system that autonomously researches, creates, and validates patches for vulnerabilities.
Our AI agents continuously monitors vulnerabilities, tracks available patches, and curates fixes that pass comprehensive test suites. The result? A developer-friendly approach that automates tedious processes, intelligently backporting essential patches directly into existing container images.
This approach mirrors what I implemented at Cloudinary, where we created AI-powered workflows that allowed developers to manage media at scale without disrupting existing processes. The key was making complex functionality accessible through simple interfaces that integrated seamlessly with developers’ preferred tools.
With Root’s agentic AI handling vulnerability research and patch creation, containers stay secure without disrupting development velocity. Our AI delivers patches for critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours—often before official updates are available.
Root AVR: Developer-Friendly by Design
To illustrate this approach, let’s walk through the five simple steps to experience Root’s AVR:
Step 1: Sign Up in 60 Seconds
Complete a streamlined one-minute signup process with just your email address and a password. No complex configurations or lengthy forms to fill out.
Step 2: Select an Image to Remediate
Choose a container image to patch by either entering a public image URL (like ubuntu:22.04) or selecting from a list of common images such as Node, Python, or Nginx. No need to connect private registries for your first experience.
Step 3: One-Click Scan and Analysis
With a single click, Root’s agentic AI system begins analyzing the image, identifying vulnerabilities, and creating a tailored remediation plan. Watch in real-time as our AI communicates exactly what it’s doing at each step.
Step 4: Tada! Download or Deploy the Remediated Image
Grab your newly secured image, ready for use in any environment. If you like what you see, you can then integrate Root directly into your CI/CD workflows for automatic remediation of all your containers.
Step 5: Review the Results
Within 180 seconds, you’ll see a clear before-and-after comparison showing vulnerability counts by severity. The dashboard highlights exactly what was patched and how many vulnerabilities were eliminated.
This entire process takes less than 3 minutes from start to finish—a stark contrast to traditional approaches where developers spend days or weeks manually addressing vulnerabilities.
Solving Problems Through Developer-First Security
Effective container vulnerability management shouldn’t force developers to choose between security and productivity. By aligning with developer experience principles—immediate value, minimal friction, and seamless integration—Root reduces friction between security and engineering teams.
We built Root AVR with these principles in mind, powered by agentic AI that transforms remediation from reactive to proactive. Our intelligent system continuously monitors vulnerabilities, creates and validates patches, and ensures transparent, automated workflows.
When thoughtfully applied to container security and enhanced by agentic AI, automation empowers development teams to shift focus from firefighting toward innovation—all beginning with delivering tangible value in 180 seconds or less.