Developer Experience (DX) has always been about clarity, speed, and keeping engineers productive. Developers these days are increasingly delegating to AI agents who write, test, and deploy on their behalf. For some, they delegate very little; for others they delegate a lot. That’s where applying skills in Agent Experience (AX) becomes critical.
If you want strong DX going forward, you can’t ignore AX. The experience you design for agents directly shapes the effectiveness of the developers they support. This talk will explore how to shift from the practices that made DX successful in the past to the new requirements of agent-driven workflows.
We’ll cover:
Who you’re really serving when building tools in an era of AI delegation.
Why prioritizing AX ensures your DX remains resilient and future-proof.
How to measure and improve your repo/system AX with practical techniques like context tools, shared systems for teams, and measuring AX efficacy.
The takeaway: to keep DX strong, you have to focus on AX. It’s not a question of supporting AI or agents in general, it’s a question of supporting the developers that use them.
Sean Roberts has been building for the web for almost 2 decades and has a passion for finding ways to make it smarter, faster, and more secure. At Netlify, Sean's focus as VP of Applied AI is to bring the power of AI to developers and the web. If you can't find him, he's skateboarding with his kids.
