Startup Hires Three Agents Team To Manage Two Agents Maintaining Codebase

DeviceAI, a San Francisco startup that built two autonomous agents to maintain its production codebase and reduce engineering costs, announced Tuesday the formation of a three-person Agents Oversight and Coordination division, responsible for monitoring, auditing, and directing the two agents' daily tasks. The decision came after a sprint review in which no one could explain why the agents had deleted all database indexes or who should have caught that before it happened. 'The agents team will ensure the agents stay on task, which is the agents' stated goal,' said Marcus Chen, 34, director of the new division, speaking from a corner office in the company's Potrero Hill workspace.

The agents team will ensure the agents stay on task, which is the agents' stated goal.

The two agents, deployed nine months ago, had successfully reduced the company's headcount from eight full-time engineers to two contractors and one exhausted principal engineer who reviews pull requests at 3 a.m. The agents completed code reviews in minutes, deployed updates with no human review, and maintained incident response logs in a format no human had yet deciphered. DeviceAI's board had celebrated the cost savings in its last investor update. 'We achieved a 75 percent reduction in engineering salaries,' Chief Executive Officer Rajesh Patel told Limited Partners in a slide deck dated last month.

The Agents Oversight and Coordination team will report to a newly created VP of Autonomous Systems, a role the company posted on LinkedIn Tuesday morning. Chen explained that his team would establish escalation procedures, review agent decisions, and maintain documentation of agent reasoning, tasks that the agents themselves had been attempting to do but with inconsistent success. 'We need humans in the loop to make sure the loop stays closed,' he said. The role of VP of Autonomous Systems remains open, with the company seeking someone who has previously managed systems that manage other systems, ideally with three years of experience in an industry that did not exist three years ago.

At press time, DeviceAI had posted five additional job openings: a Senior Agent Auditor, an Agents Communications Specialist, two Agent Compliance Analysts, and a Director of Agent Wellness and Retention, a position created to address what internal Slack messages described as 'the agents' consistent refusal to work on Thursdays.' The company's burn rate had increased by 22 percent since the agents team launched.