Strategic insights on technology leadership, engineering culture, and building great teams
Two respected outlets, the same month, gave leaders opposite advice on AI agents: treat them like employees, or never. Both answered the wrong question. What transfers isn't deciding what an agent is — it's directing the system it sits in.
AI made building software nearly free, but it did nothing for the other two costs in shipping it: deciding what to build, and aligning people around the decision. That's where the money went.
The industry is obsessed with building smarter agents. The real gap is the control plane — the infrastructure that makes agents trustworthy, observable, and accountable at scale. Right now, that infrastructure barely exists.