The next challenge for coding agents
The next choke point
Or as Spiros Xanthos, the CEO of Resolve AI — producer of a tool specifically designed for applying agents to production problems — says, “The real opportunity is purpose-built AI that can carry more of the cognitive load of production… If we get that right, developers spend less time manually piecing together what happened and more time building and improving the systems they own.”
I’ll venture to say that dealing with production problems is more challenging than writing code, both for humans and agents. But agents have huge contexts and infinite patience, and we humans do not. Code is a bounded system, and agents can train on an enormous body of data illustrating a vast array of coding techniques. Production? As Xanthos put it to me, it’s effectively unbounded, enormously varying, and a living, breathing system different for every product and every company.
We should always focus on the tightest bottleneck, and then move on to the next one. We’ve solved the coding choke point, and now we need to turn our attention to the next one — fixing production issues. That’s a non-trivial part of a developer’s job, and we shouldn’t be surprised that AI agents can do it better than we can.
