Matt Gibiec of Dynatrace argues that coding agents are fast but blind without real context about how services run in production, and introduces Bluebox, an observability agent that brings dependency maps, production baselines, and change history into local testing, issue detection, fix suggestions, and pre-build planning, with a human approving the final result.
Davis Palmie of Factory explains the software factory, a system of agents that turns bug reports and user feedback into production code. He covers leadership concerns about cost, model choice, engineering roles, and org structure, argues that coding was never the bottleneck, and lays out principles for a factory: model agnosticism, sovereign deployment, and SDLC-wide integration. He also describes eight pillars of agent readiness, starting with narrow use cases like incident triage, and closes with why outcome metrics should replace token counts.
The talk argues that while agent runtimes and orchestration are solved problems, the crucial missing piece for building scalable 'software factories' is a dedicated coordination layer. Current tools like GitHub are inadequate, and a new primitive, potentially a CLI gateway, is needed for agents to manage tasks, pass messages, and navigate the software development lifecycle.