← About Jesse Robbins

Why I invest in AI developer tools

I invest in AI developer tools because I have lived the problem they solve. I spent my career building infrastructure that helps developers move faster and fail less. AI does not change that mission. It accelerates it.

Delegation is the new automation. The shift from manual operations to automated pipelines was the defining move of the DevOps era. The next shift is from automation to delegation. AI agents that take on complex workflows with judgment, not just scripts. That requires a new layer of tooling. Agents need context, guardrails, observability, and the same developer experience standards we expect for humans.

AI agents are just another kind of developer. They need the same good infrastructure that serves human developers well. The companies I back in this category are building that layer.

Continue is an AI code assistant that meets developers where they already work, in the IDE, connected to the models and context sources the team chooses. I sit on the board. Mstone is building AI-native infrastructure for the next generation of development workflows.

The winners in enterprise AI will not be whoever builds the biggest model. They will be whoever builds the best tools around the models. The data pipelines, the developer experience, the trust layer. That is the category I know.

Further reading