The engineering constraint has moved

Writing code for a software change used to be expensive. Not anymore.

A coding agent can turn a bug report, customer request, or idea from a product meeting into a plausible implementation while the team is still deciding where the work belongs. But written code is not shipped software.

Someone still has to decide whether the change solves the right problem, fits the system, is safe, and should ship.

For teams adopting coding agents, the engineering constraint has moved from producing changes to getting changes safely into production. Improving throughput now means redesigning what happens after the code exists.

More starts do not mean more shipped software

A team can produce many pull requests, but if evaluation, testing, and release stay the same, it has only improved its ability to start work. I explored the review bottleneck in Generation Is Solved. Merging Is Not, but the constraint extends beyond review.

Every open change carries context someone must recover, assumptions someone must check, and decisions someone must make. As the queue grows, senior engineers become the people every change waits for.

Shipped changes are the throughput that matters. The scarce resource is the attention and confidence required to turn proposed code into software the team is willing to own.

Move judgment into the workflow

Making senior engineers the approval layer for an expanding queue of agent output will exhaust the people whose judgment matters most. Their expertise needs more reach:

• Security specialists should turn recurring concerns into checks that travel with the work.
• Platform engineers should make realistic environments available without configuring each one by hand.
• Experienced engineers should encode what the team has learned about testing and operating its systems.

This does not automate every decision. It reserves expert attention for unfamiliar risks and consequential tradeoffs.

Engineering moves downstream of the first implementation: choosing, testing, correcting, and deciding what is worth shipping.

Give the change a place to live

A pull request records the diff and discussion. A chat thread records some reasoning. Neither preserves the running environment. At every handoff, someone may need to check out the branch, configure dependencies, reproduce the issue, start the application, and recover context.

I'm the CEO and co-founder of Tembo. Tembo provides a fleet of ephemeral cloud computers for agent work using the coding agents and models teams choose.^[1]

Our starting point is that every proposed software change should have a computer with its repositories, dependencies, tools, and running preview of the software already in place.

People and agents can return to that computer throughout the change. The next person continues the work instead of rebuilding its surroundings on a laptop.

This does not replace version control, CI, review, or engineering judgment. It gives the team a common place to exercise them.

Build with us

We are looking for a small group of engineering leaders whose teams use coding agents but need to make shift to optimize developer happiness and work output. If you’re interested, get in touch with me to learn more how we’re working to solve this.