5Latent Space (swyx)·
Modal CTO Akshat Bubna on evolving AI infrastructure for Agent Experience
Latent Space interviews Modal co-founder and CTO Akshat Bubna on why AI infrastructure must evolve to support agentic workloads, drawing on two years of lessons building what Modal calls the 'agent cloud.' The conversation covers why Agent Experience is becoming viable now and what Modal has learned operating at scale. This is a practitioner-level perspective from a company building infrastructure specifically for AI agents.
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Related events (8)
The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray
A Latent Space podcast episode featuring Cognition's Walden Yan and OpenInspect's Cole Murray discussing the current state of autonomous software engineering agents. Topics include Devin's reported 80% commit rate, spec-to-PR workflows, full VM environments for agents, agent memory, and the emerging pattern of product managers shipping code directly. The conversation covers practical deployment patterns and tooling for async agentic coding workflows.
AINews: Agents for Everything Else — Codex for Knowledge Work, Claude for Creative Work
A Latent Space daily AI news digest reflecting on the expanding scope of coding agents beyond software development into knowledge work and creative work domains. The piece uses OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude as anchoring examples of agents 'breaking containment' from their original coding/assistant niches. Published as a quieter news day commentary, it surveys the broadening agent ecosystem landscape.
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era
A tier-2 commentary piece from One Useful Thing offering guidance on selecting AI systems in the current agentic era, signaling a shift in framing from chatbots to agents as the primary use-case paradigm. The piece appears to survey the landscape of available AI tools and their appropriate applications. As a practitioner-oriented guide, it reflects the growing complexity of the AI tooling ecosystem as agentic capabilities proliferate.
Latent Space: Skill engineering and the case against one-shot AI design
Paul Bakaus discusses 'skill engineering' as a design philosophy for AI-assisted workflows, arguing against fully automated one-shot AI pipelines in favor of keeping humans in the loop. The conversation centers on Impeccable, a tool or approach Bakaus is developing, and the concept of 'loopmaxxing' — iterative human-agent collaboration cycles. The piece addresses why current agents still require human steering to produce high-quality outputs.
Databricks co-founders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin argue for open frontier AI ecosystem
Latent Space hosts a double-interview with Databricks technical co-founders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin, who make the case that an open frontier AI ecosystem is necessary for enterprises to build what they call 'Agent Clouds.' The conversation covers Databricks' strategic vision for enterprise AI infrastructure and the conditions required for broad adoption of agentic systems. As a tier-2 commentary piece from a respected AI podcast, it reflects the thinking of influential technical leaders at a major data/AI platform company.
Rethinking Organizational Design in the Age of Agentic AI
A MIT Technology Review commentary examines the gap between enterprise ambition and readiness for agentic AI adoption, citing survey data showing 85% of organizations want to be agentic within three years but 76% say their current infrastructure cannot support that transition. The piece focuses on organizational design challenges—people, processes, and workflows—as the primary barriers to agentic AI deployment at scale.
GitHub's plan for agentic coding — Kyle Daigle interview on Latent Space
Latent Space interviews Kyle Daigle of GitHub about the company's strategy for agentic coding workflows and the platform pressures created by the explosion in AI-assisted development following Copilot. The discussion covers how GitHub is adapting its infrastructure and product direction to support agents operating at scale. This is a strategic signal from one of the most central platforms in the developer AI ecosystem.
MIT Technology Review: Leadership challenges in hybrid human-AI enterprises
MIT Technology Review examines how leadership teams are adapting to a projected 300% surge in AI agent adoption over the next two years. The piece focuses on the organizational and managerial implications of AI agents that autonomously coordinate complex tasks across tools and environments, distinguishing them from prior automation paradigms. The article addresses strategic and workforce management questions for enterprises integrating agentic AI.