Written by: Techub News Organization

Recently, the YC Root Access program held an in-depth conversation with a group of founders of developer tools who are building infrastructure for AI agents. These founders come from companies like Infracloud, Resend, Recall, Griptape, Firecrawl, and Porter, and their products are being used by giants such as NVIDIA, Coinbase, and Hugging Face. This discussion focused on how AI agents fundamentally change the way software is built, the role of developers, and the future of the tool ecosystem, providing valuable front-line insights for practitioners caught in the wave of transformation.

1. Agent First: A Dual Transformation of Product and Company Organization

As AI agents become significant users or even "developers," the design philosophy of tool products and the way companies operate are undergoing dramatic changes.

Several founders emphasized the need to elevate the "agent experience" to a priority equal to or even greater than "developer experience." This means that product interfaces need to be deeply redesigned for agents. For example, the founder of Recall mentioned that they completely redesigned the product experience to be agent-friendly. Specific measures include encapsulating everything into a command line interface (CLI) to make data easier to export so that agents can easily call it through code (like Cloud Code). The core driver of this shift is that agents are becoming an important channel for customer acquisition and distribution. One founder shared a surprising discovery: through analyzing user sources, they realized that all major programming models (like Claude and ChatGPT) frequently recommend their products, which has become an unexpected and powerful growth engine.

This "agent first" thinking also profoundly affects the internal organization structure of companies. The founder of Infracloud introduced that their changes are "radical." The company began to create one dedicated Open Cloud agent after another for specific functions, from marketing and sales to infrastructure and DevOps. These agents not only changed the form of products but also reshaped the way companies operate, significantly enhancing the ability to process tasks in parallel. "Previously, you might do one feature at a time; now you can do ten features in parallel."

Facing such a rapid paradigm shift, the mindset of founders also needs to adjust. One founder reflected that if he were to start a business today, he would prioritize the agent experience much earlier. More importantly, he suggested being more "ruthless" in deleting features or product parts that might lose value quickly in the future. "You need to emotionally detach yourself from the product because what you build today may only be useful for a few months; then the world will change, and that part of the product will become useless. Having the courage to ruthlessly delete what is no longer useful will become increasingly important."

2. The Essence of Developer Experience and the Return of Product Intuition

While pursuing the agent experience, the understanding of traditional "developer experience" is also deepening and correcting. Founders shared the mistakes they made early on and the valuable lessons learned.

The founder of Resend admitted that they once deviated from the "developer spirit"—which emphasizes getting things done quickly, directly, and with clear pricing. He believes that these qualities valued by developers essentially constitute excellent user experiences. However, in the iterative process such as market promotion, they sometimes strayed from these principles, which typically is a mistake.

Another common misunderstanding is a one-sided understanding of "developer experience." The founder of Porter recalled that early on, they thought developer experience was just about having a perfect user interface and design. But now they realize that the core of true developer experience is: how quickly developers can reach their "aha moment" and how efficiently they can use the required features in their environment. Therefore, current optimizations focus more on speed, efficiency, and clarity of use.

A deeper reflection concerns "trusting one's intuition." Several founders mentioned that as entrepreneurs fresh out of college, when faced with "real" developer users in large companies, they overly relied on user research and hesitated to trust their product intuition. "We thought we were different from them... We leaned too much on understanding users, which is important, but did not trust our instinct about what a good product should be." When they started to trust their intuition more, they discovered that the products had accumulated a lot of "redundancy," and if they had trusted their instincts earlier, they could have created more delightful products. The depth of understanding that comes from personally using the product and making judgments based on it is challenging to gain solely through conversations with users.

The rise of agents has even changed the fundamental form of "documentation." The founder of Recall pointed out that traditional documentation is filled with explanatory text, scattered across multiple pages and embedded tutorials. But now they need to pay close attention to the context window limitations of agents. Therefore, they redesigned most of the documentation to easily fit the context window of programming agents. This way, when agents are integrating APIs, the accuracy is higher and the errors are fewer.

3. A New Paradigm of Human-Machine Collaboration: From Writing Code to Providing Context and Strategy

The proliferation of AI programming agents is redefining the activity of "programming" and the role of engineers. The founders' own practices serve as the best examples.

When asked if they still write code themselves, the answers varied but pointed to the same trend: the "painful task" of coding is being handled by agents, and the human role is shifting to a higher level. One founder stated that he no longer writes code but writes prompts for humans and agents. Another founder said he submits pull requests daily, but most of the code is done by programming agents; his job is to review this code and spend more time communicating with model builders, hardware companies, and application developers. Even more, one founder excitedly pointed out that, due to programming agents eliminating tedious work in coding, he now writes more code than he did a few months ago—for fun.

An important observation is that the role of managers is also changing. In the past, engineering managers often became bottlenecks for releasing new features due to management scale. But now they can write production code while handling personnel management and meetings. "I believe this will become the norm in the future."

The value of founders writing code themselves lies more in maintaining a "tactile sense" of the product. One founder mentioned that the primary purpose of maintaining a small number of internal tools is to ensure that he can use the product multiple times daily, personally experiencing newly developed features and thereby being able to discuss what needs to change in the product more trustingly and clearly, as well as what works well.

A more macro-level shift is that "code itself is no longer important" becomes a consensus among many founders. In the future, what is truly important is context, deep understanding of problems, and the ability to build relationships with customers. "I don't think you can create an atmosphere around code." The software industry will continue to exist, and those who turn computing power into problem-solving solutions will not disappear, but the core essence of work has changed.

Agents have even provided unexpected help at the strategic thinking level. One founder shared that he initially attempted to let agents access customer support tickets, recent pull requests, and other data, and then let the agents evaluate the work plan he set for the coming weeks. The results were surprising: the agents demonstrated excellent judgment. This is due to their far superior context window, which can quickly read massive amounts of information and clearly point out unreasonable aspects of the plan, or remind him of features that users generally requested but he overlooked. "They performed so well in critiquing our plans that I was quite surprised." He emphasized that this does not mean letting agents formulate strategies but using them as a powerful "sounding board" to reveal blind spots in his thinking, which is an undervalued aspect of interacting with agents today.

4. Future Outlook: The Rise of Open Source, Market Long Tails, and Fully Autonomous Agents

Looking forward, the founders shared their most exciting trends and predictions.

The rapid catch-up of open-source models and efficient operations were mentioned multiple times and are considered a "secret." With the improvement of the toolchain, the open-source ecosystem is rapidly approaching the experience of closed-source models. Another key trend is that the programming agent market will not be a winner-takes-all. Due to the vastly different perfect interfaces for different roles (such as backend engineers, designers, customer service personnel, and financial staff) expressing their intentions, a very long tail of product distribution will emerge, highly customized for specific groups and scenarios. This is similar to how different developers preferred different IDEs before the AI era.

Regarding the value of engineers, opinions are clear and optimistic: AI agents will make engineers more valuable, not less. Because they eliminate a large amount of tedious work in software construction, allowing people to produce better software at a faster speed and higher quality, thus releasing greater demand. Some founders confirmed that their companies plan to hire more staff than originally intended.

The points of excitement for the future focus on several aspects:

• "Creative programming": Developers only need to present ideas, perspectives, and aesthetics, while agents are responsible for transforming them into industrial-grade code deployable to millions of users.
• Fully autonomous agents: Development tools will no longer require human intervention in the loop, as agents can independently complete all tasks such as registration, payment, and access management, releasing a scale of resource usage unattainable by humans.
• AI event response: When production infrastructure fails, AI will be able to perform verifiable event handling, which is expected to become a reality this year.
• Hardware advancements: Today's data center-level models will become privately running AI assistants on personal computers in the future.
• Developer influence spillover: As programming becomes a highly leveraged skill that automates everything, developers will increasingly enter other industries.

Finally, all founders emphasized that change is the only constant theme. One founder summarized: "If you're not accustomed to change, you should start getting used to it." In the past, people could predict the future 5 to 10 years ahead, but that is no longer possible. We have not yet fully figured everything out, and we must be prepared for more changes. Although the road ahead is full of turbulence, the value of the software industry and engineers will continue to evolve under new paradigms, moving towards a future where software is better, faster, and more powerful.

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