Delegation is the new automation

Delegation is the new automation.

The shift from manual operations to automated pipelines was the defining move of the DevOps era. I helped build that era. At Amazon, at Chef, through the Velocity Conference. Every major wave of developer tooling has been about automating what was previously manual. Infrastructure as code. Continuous integration. Continuous delivery. Each layer removed toil and let developers focus on the work that mattered.

The next shift is from automation to delegation. AI agents do not just execute scripts. They take on complex workflows with judgment. Understanding context, making decisions, adapting to conditions. That is delegation, not automation. It is a fundamentally different capability, and it requires a fundamentally different layer of tooling.

AI agents are just another kind of developer. They need the same good infrastructure that serves human developers well. Context, guardrails, observability, developer experience. The companies building that layer are what I invest in.

The pattern is the same one I have seen across every wave: manual to automated to delegated. Each transition empowers more people to build. Each transition creates a new infrastructure layer underneath. And each transition is underestimated by the people who built the previous one. I tried to kill EC2 because I was an Ops guy. I have learned to pay attention to the next layer, not fight it.