The companies winning with AI agents didn’t get lucky. They built the infrastructure years ago.
AI Coding Agents are running rampant, and it’s thrilling.
- Ramp’s Inspect background agent authored 30% of merged PRs.
- Stripe’s Minions merge >1000 PRs a week.
- Spotify’s “best developers” are using “Honk” and “have not written a single line of code since December.”
Agents have vindicated Cloud Development Environments, and made them essential for embracing the next wave of engineering patterns.
Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) are nothing new.
- Stripe’s public marketing of its Developer Environments [2022] was one of the watershed moments for this pattern.
- Gergely Orosz, of The Pragmatic Engineer, covered Cloud Development Environments in 2023.
- Gartner added Cloud Development Environments to their 2023 Hype Cycle.
However, they never seemed to break containment. They remained restricted to elite SaaS “startups.” Vendors for CDEs never hit escape velocity.
It’s a shame. CDEs solve essential challenges in scaling development: standardization, ergonomics, speed, and security isolation.
Background agents have changed the calculus. CDEs give you sandboxed execution for untrusted agent code. Reproducible environments mean predictable behavior. Spin-up is trivial, enabling parallelism. Secrets stay centralized, not scattered across developer laptops. The companies that invested in CDEs are seeing them port cleanly and safely over to their army of agents.
If you’re not in the anointed few, you’re trying to tack Agents onto clunky CI/CD and the terrifying security landscape of your developer machines (agents and ~/.aws don’t mix). You won’t see the same pace or the same outcomes.
These agent success stories aren’t lucky. It’s companies earning the dividends of CDE investment. If you’re trying to adopt the latest and greatest in AI Coding patterns, skip the hard lessons. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Start from a CDE.