Coding Agents Need a Feedback Loop; Cloud-Native Systems Make That Hard (opens in new tab)

The first time I watched a coding agent finish a task in under a minute and then spent the next hour figuring out whether the change actually worked, I understood what the productivity numbers were hiding. Generating the code was fast. Validating that it worked was not. It was slow because the change touched a service that talked to four other services, and there was no way for the agent to exercise that path without me standing up an environment, redeploying, and running the request myself. ...