Rethinking MTTR: Security’s Real Bottleneck Is Developer Efficiency

There’s an old joke: everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

That’s starting to sound a lot like MTTR.

“Mean time to remediate” would be a great pick for your buzzword bingo card in security. You’ll hear it in board meetings, dashboards, vendor pitches. Does it lead to meaningful change? I could actually hear you laugh from over here.

Most teams can tell you their number (or at least ballpark it). Fewer can tell you what’s actually slowing them down. Most teams I’ve seen aren’t even asking the right question: who is doing the remediation?

The answer is almost always: developers. Security teams can tell you what’s going on, but they aren’t the ones stuck doing the work to actually fix it.

Every fix belongs to the engineers already juggling feature work, release schedules, tech debt, and now a vuln they didn't cause but are somehow responsible for fixing.

What if we thought about MTTR differently…as optimizing an engineering problem centered around developer velocity, instead of a security one?

What Really Slows Down Remediation

If you want to fix MTTR, you have to understand what’s slowing it down (we can start with the obvious: it’s almost never what the security dashboard says).

Developers do want to fix their code and keep it working well. But the whole system is set up to make it hard:

• No context. Most vuln reports don’t explain what actually matters. Is this exploitable? Is this used? Is this noise? Devs are left guessing (or digging).
• No fix. Even if the vuln is real, what’s the fix? The answer is usually a link to docs, a CVE writeup, or a shrug. So the developer has to drop everything and go figure it out.
• Bad timing. The report hits after the sprint started. The ticket shows up mid-PR. The fix needs to happen, but it arrives at the worst possible moment.
• Misaligned incentives. Engineering leads want velocity. Security wants risk reduction. Life becomes a series of push-me, pull-you responses.

If you really, really want faster remediation, the answer’s simple: don’t interrupt developers. Equip them when and where they’re already working.

What If Fixes…But That Actually Fix Things?

I started Amplify because I was sick of how most tools stop at “raising awareness” for whatever vulns they find. They’ll tell you what’s wrong, drop a ticket in Jira, and call it a day. Every time, it’s the devs who have to go figure out the fix, test it, and hope it doesn’t break something else. That’s the gap where MTTR dies, and you can’t solve for it with most security tools.

Amplify is different.

Amplify actually closes the MTTR gap. It looks at the running code, figures out what’s exploitable, and writes a real fix. What do I mean by that? I mean it 1) fits your codebase and 2) is ready to merge. You open a pull request, and the patch is already sitting there waiting for you. You don’t need to leave the workflow or ask anyone for help. It’s just done.

When you start to see that happen across a few repos, the vibe shifts. People stop ignoring alerts because the fixes are real and quick. MTTR starts to move for the only reason it ever really does: engineers have less work to do.

That’s the whole game. Make the fix the easy part. Let security become something that happens quietly, inside the work, instead of as an interruption.

If you’ve made it this far, you know you’re curious (and it’s free to try, so what are you waiting for?). Here’s the link. You know what to do next.