By Kamal Hathi,
Publication Date: 2026-10-20 12:00:00
A few years ago, I could describe how a production incident would unfold before it happened. When something changed, a signal degraded. A team, sometimes a large one, pulled in from three time zones, followed the trail backward until we found the commit, the config, or the dependency that broke. The work was hard, but the logic held.
That logic is shifting. It isn’t that our systems have become sloppier, but our processes are struggling to keep pace with the reality of modern architecture. We have moved toward systems designed for self-directed operational reasoning and execution across distributed environments — systems that are built to adapt in real time rather than follow the static, predictable routes of the past.
Agents handed a goal will find their own route to it, and the route they pick today may not be the one they pick tomorrow. That autonomy is the whole point of agentic AI. It’s also the end of an assumption we stopped questioning long ago: that understanding a…
