Agents are the next distributed system: non-deterministic, autonomous, and tool-connected. Some patterns we rely on to run distributed systems reliably transfer directly; others break down and need rethinking.
This talk applies lessons from DevOps, platform engineering, and SRE to the agent era: enablement structures, hybrid pipelines mixing deterministic and probabilistic steps, SLOs and error budgets for agent reliability, context engineering as the new dependency management, golden paths for non-deterministic actors, and where human judgment belongs in agent pipelines.
Building blocks, patterns, tactics, and hard learnings from running agents in production on enterprise client engagements.
This talk has been presented at TechLead Conf Amsterdam 2026: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.




















