Coding agents changed the math on software delivery. Teams that shipped ten PRs a day now see a hundred, and most of that code was never run by a human before it hit CI. The error budget didn't grow with it.
Change is still the leading cause of incidents. When change volume goes up an order of magnitude and validation stays flat, one of two things happens. The pipeline backs up, or teams cut corners to clear it. Either way, the risk lands in production and on the people who run it.
The usual fixes (more CI runners, more mocks, test in prod) don't hold at this scale. In a microservices system, the failures that reach production are rarely unit-level. Integration failures across services, queues, and data stores are the ones that slip into production, and the only way to catch them before merge is to run the change in an environment against real dependencies.
Teams build them two ways today: shared or fully duplicated stacks. I'll show why neither can absorb 10x the change, then walk through a third approach that gives every PR its own isolated environment without duplicating the stack.
You'll leave with a framework for what to verify before merge, what to leave to production, and how to keep the error budget intact when agents write most of the code.
Arjun Iyer is the CEO and Co-founder of Signadot. Signadot helps engineering teams verify code before it merges, at the volume coding agents now produce it. Before Signadot, he spent nearly six years at AppDynamics, where he launched the BusinessIQ business unit and led the company's data science organization. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
