Angie Jones

Building an Autonomous Engineering Org - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation

Jun 28, 2026 · 17:36

Angie Jones describes how she transformed Block's 3,500-person engineering org into an autonomous one using AI agents, starting with a maturity model and an AI champions program of 50 hand-picked engineers. She details making repos AI-ready with context and rules files, then enabling delegation from Slack, Jira, and GitHub, which boosted AI-authored code by 69% and automated PRs 21x. Multi-agent parallelism required cloud workspaces and a company world model across 25,000 repos, culminating in BuilderBot that allowed anyone to @mention it for fixes. However, the success led to layoffs, raising existential questions about the human cost of autonomous engineering.

Build Systems, Not Code - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation

Jun 25, 2026 · 19:39

Angie Jones (Agentic AI Foundation) argues that engineering discipline remains essential when building agentic systems, moving the joy of building from writing code to designing system architecture. Using her Relocation Scout house-hunting agent as an example, she walks through applying skills like systems thinking, workflow design, decomposition, separation of concerns, modularity, and algorithmic thinking. She advises using code for deterministic tasks like commute calculation, agents for judgment on listings, and humans for authority to approve tours. Jones stresses defining structured contracts between components, designing for idempotency with memory logging, and threat modeling to treat all external input as untrusted. She advocates baking maintainability into the system with self-documenting workflows so that any agent or human can orient themselves without reverse-engineering prompts.