A New Era of Engineering Challenges

The New Era – Building Products with Goals and Guardrails

Advances in AI will change the way products are designed and built. Products today can be tailored to each business in ways not possible only a couple years ago by offering more flexibility and customization through automating code generation. (See this Doyen post for more on Goals and Guardrails as it relates to automated code generation.)

These novel products require that we rethink not only how products are built, but the tools needed to maintain those products, and the ways users should interact with those products. Broadly two key functional areas deserve increased reflection –

1. Automated Code Generation
2. Feedback Visualizations

Automated Code Generation

To support code generated for each business we need to think about unique agentic frameworks which can manage and maintain code across a large number of repos in a largely automated fashion. Automated code generation doesn’t stop after the initial code is generated. The product must maintain the code through changes like product updates, changing inputs/outputs (these changes can be maintained through self-healing), changing compliance requirements, and changing operational requirements (for instance if more scale is required to support the business). 

Feedback Visualizations

Most agentic flows today, especially complex flows, require ongoing human feedback to ensure that jobs are done correctly. An important consideration is how best to expose information to the user around what the agent is doing. The information should be exposed in optimal ways for not only the human to quickly understand and comment on, but also in a way that the agents driving the flows can easily generate, process, and leverage.

These are really exciting times to be an engineer or product manager as we explore new product frameworks which leverage the transformational power of LLMs to empower businesses.