From Blind Spots to Merged PRs: Continuous Agentic Performance Optimization - May Walter, Hud
Jul 19, 2026 · 22:46
May Walter, CTO of Hud, presents a case study on using coding agents with runtime intelligence to automate continuous performance optimization in production. The system analyzes real production traces, queries, and latencies to surface high-ROI fixes like N+1 queries and missing indexes, scoring them by complexity and impact. It runs weekly via GitHub Actions and Claude Code, generating reports with verified fixes and evidence of impact, such as P90 latency improvements after deployment. Key challenges included 'plausible unverified' fixes, complex ClickHouse queries, and lazy fixes that only mask exceptions rather than root causes. Walter emphasizes the need for prod-to-code context mapping, scoring guardrails, and human review to achieve reliable automation. The talk concludes that context over cleverness works, and agents can automate the investigation phase that teams rarely do proactively, turning dormant performance debt into actionable merged PRs.
