Designing agent-first platforms: What changes when agents do the work

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For decades, applications have been designed to wait. A user clicks, a request arrives, code runs, a response goes back. And we got very good at this. We learned to forecast traffic, scale on demand, wrap everything in enterprise controls, and run it all with the operational discipline that keeps critical business systems available around the clock.

That model is being turned on its head, and being asked to serve apps that continuously act, and wait for no one.

What changed is not the infrastructure underneath, but the software being written on top of it. The work we used to capture as deterministic code, where every branch was defined in advance and every step was known before the first line ran, is now being rewritten as multi-agent applications that work out the steps at runtime. A developer used to encode the path, and now a developer describes the outcome and...

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