SPEAKER
Paul Duvall
Founder, Redacted Ventures | Former AWS Director | Author of Continuous Integration
Paul Duvall is the founder of Redacted Ventures and author of Continuous Integration, winner of a 2008 Jolt Award. He also authored the DevSecOps on AWS series covering continuous security and continuous compliance. Previously, Paul held director roles at AWS spanning DevSecOps, security engineering, and security innovation. Before AWS, he co-founded Stelligent, an AWS-focused DevOps engineering firm acquired twice, and is an AWS Hero alumnus. Since 2023, he has built extensively with AI coding agents and maintains the open-source AI Development Patterns project.
Upcoming sessions
See complete program3 November
12:25 PM · 30 min
Who Gets the Keys? Trust and Authority in Software Factories
As software factories become more autonomous, the hard problem shifts from generating code to deciding what an agent is allowed to do next. This talk follows one failure end to end: a malicious instruction enters through a work item, survives into the agent’s context, and influences the system responsible for verifying the change.
We will trace that failure across three feedback latencies: seconds in the agent loop, minutes in CI, and hours in production. The focus is progressive agent authority: separating the agent that creates a change from the systems that verify evidence and authorize the next action.
You’ll learn how to set boundaries for agent authority, define the evidence required to expand that authority, and decide where human approval still matters.
You’ll leave with an agent-authority matrix for mapping capabilities, evidence, ownership, and gates before granting agents broader write, merge, deploy, or production access.
