“We've built software for decades and the substrate layer for most software is a database. How often has the database changed? Hardly ever. SQL still exists. We are in a world where the substrate layer is a model itself and it's not staying still. … What happens to all the agents that you built that work great on the previous version? You need to evolve them. Imagine being able to do that with no ADLC. You have no test cases, no evals. You're not moving because you're mortally afraid of breaking something.”
The Growth Podcast · Product & Design · November 2026
Context
Asked whether the agent development life cycle forces teams toward continuous deployment, Salesforce's AI engineering head explains that the model underneath is constantly changing, so without evals teams can't safely upgrade.
Transcript
…things. And now they need this skill set to be able to evaluate these agents, to be able to make sure that they work, to be able to observe them, to be able to understand what is drifting, to be able to be told what's drifting and then bring the human in to correct it, to steer it, if you will.
So it sounds like part of what is involved in the ADLC is moving a lot faster. If you were on a six-month ship cycle, it sounds like you need to almost go to a continuous deployment. It can self-heal whenever it wants cycle.
Yeah. And I think there's a very good reason why the pace is this way. It's because often the substrate layer, things that you build on, don't change as fast as they are today. Think about it this way. We've built software for decades and the substrate layer for most software is a database. How often has the database changed? How often has the programming language to program the database changed? Hardly ever. SQL still exists. We are in a world where the substrate layer is a model itself and it's not staying still. It is evolving at a very rapid rate. The changes between what we saw in the current version of Cloud and the previous version of Cloud is significant, right? So you have to, so what happens to all the agents that you built that work great on the previous one? You need to evolve them. You need to simplify them. And there are certain dimensions on which you need to simplify. Imagine being able to do that with no ADLC. You have no test cases, no evals. How are you going to go flip the, you're going to, you're just going to, if you didn't have all of that infrastructure built, the rate at which you move, the hugging of the tangent, if you will, it's not happening because you're mortally afraid of breaking something. But if you do, on the other hand, you can really go fast. And…
Everything downstream has to change though, then, right? Your product marketing, your customer support, everybody has to shift to this much more agile way of working. Some companies are still stuck in the past, right? They're still shipping every couple months. How does a company go from zero to…
Yeah, I think the first thing is, I think you nailed it. You have to be building and releasing continuously. You have to be doing that in discrete chunks that matter to customers. At the end of the day, we're shipping something that we want to have impact with customers that adds value to…
create lots of tech debt when they would switch to this.
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