When does an agent platform stop working?#
When a team has to file a ticket and wait. An AI agent platform that routes every request through a central group has rebuilt the queue platform engineering was invented to remove. The test is self-service: can a mission team get context, a sandbox, scoped permissions and a validation run without asking anyone?
The CNCF platforms white paper asks for the same product discipline in any internal developer platform. The difference here is that many of the users are machines.
How should the platform balance control and convenience?#
Make the safe path the fastest path. A short list of mandatory controls, such as guardrails, permission boundaries and audit trails, sits inside a larger set of conveniences teams adopt because they save time. Compliance then happens by default.
In a software factory, the factory defines how work is built and checked, and the platform is how every team reaches it. Lore shows how we are approaching shared context infrastructure for agents.