So if you want to target an infra engineer at a growth company, usually in growth companies where there is only one, maybe two infra/non-product engineers, I would recommend that you start from the following axioms:

  1. Infra engineers always want to apply changes by themselves, but tooling can always recommend changes
  2. What are all the kinds of work that infra engineers would love to do, that *do* add value, but that they haven't built yet because they can't prioritize it?
  3. How do you build an agent that:
    a. Understands architectural context
    b. Offers to set up (i.e. Terraform PR) value-adding infra
    c. That the human infra engineer can easily maintain
    d. That the human infra engineer will appreciate as being value-adding and not time-wasting or unnecessary-expense?

Yes, some of this definitely resonates. We really want the agents to suggest their own, novel projects, beyond security or cost optimization. I think this is more feasible for coding agents to do in infra rather than dev work because a lot of the dev work depends strictly on what the customers want, whereas infra work can be more internal and developer focused so there’s opportunities to suggest improvements to the internal system.

I think in the near-term, however, the problem we have identified is that while developers at growth stage have been vastly accelerated, the infra engineers have not been. So our tool is almost helping them “catch up” to the new rapid pace of development. This is dangerous due to the complexity and need for infrastructure to be robust, hence why we are really focused on making it safe to use.

At larger enterprisey companies, AI has not yet been an extreme productivity boost for the developers like it has been for growth stage companies. But I do believe that an enterprise adoption wave is coming.