Why AI Agents Are ‘Just Another Backend’

Description

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Edith Harbaugh, LaunchDarkly’s co-founder and CEO, sat down with TNS Founder and Publisher Alex Williams to talk about treating AI agents as just another backend tool, and how Harbaugh is watching over 5,000 LaunchDarkly customers worldwide release dozens of times a day while looking ahead to a future where software fixes itself. At AWS ReInvent 2025, Harbaugh, traces back to how software release practices have radically accelerated over the past decade and how AI is pushing them even further. In 2014, quarterly or semiannual releases were still common, shaped by legacy thinking from the era of physical software “golden discs” that had to be perfect before shipping. As cloud-based SaaS models matured, CI/CD and rolling releases replaced versioned updates, enabling companies like LaunchDarkly’s customers to deploy changes dozens of times per day with faster feedback loops. Harbaugh argues that AI agents fit naturally into this evolution: they are simply another backend system to measure, test, and control. While AI introduces non-deterministic behavior, the core principles remain the same. Looking ahead, Harbaugh envisions self-healing software, where AI agents not only detect failures but generate, commit, and deploy fixes autonomously, as well as automate tasks like localization. Rather than reducing engineering roles, she believes AI will amplify them, continuing the long trend of increasing developer productivity. Here's the full article to go along with the video: https://thenewstack.io/why-ai-agents-are-just-another-backend/ Learn more from The New Stack about software delivery in the AI era: Ship Fast, Break Nothing: LaunchDarkly’s Winning Formula https://thenewstack.io/ship-fast-break-nothing-launchdarklys-winning-formula/ The Future Is AI, but AI Has a Software Delivery Problem https://thenewstack.io/the-future-is-ai-but-ai-has-a-software-delivery-problem/ Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. https://thenewstack.io/newsletter