Dana Lawson

Built for Humans. Now Agents Are Here.

Netlify was built around a human loop: a developer pushes code, scans the build logs, checks the deploy preview, decides it's good. Every part of the platform , the CLI, the API, the branch workflow it was designed assuming someone was paying attention. Then agents started driving it. And things broke in unexpected ways. Agents don't scan logs — they need structured, actionable signals or they retry blindly. Deploy previews designed for human eyeballs don't tell an agent whether the result is correct. CLI output written for readability becomes noise when a machine is parsing it for intent. The branch workflow that feels intuitive to a developer becomes an ambiguous decision tree for an agent with no intuition. This talk is about what Netlify's platform revealed when agents came to work on it — and what Agent Experience (AX) means in practice: redesigning the surfaces, signals, and feedback loops that platforms expose so that humans and agents can build together without humans becoming the bottleneck. Audiences will learn: - What concretely breaks in build pipelines, CLI surfaces, and deploy workflows when agents start driving them - What AX means in practice: actionable signals, machine-readable errors, and feedback loops designed for collaboration - Why the scarce resource in an agent-assisted world isn't code, it's the judgment to build systems agents can actually work with