# How continuous deployment and coding agents are changing software development

DevFeed: [How continuous deployment and coding agents are changing software development](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/judgment-and-creativity-are-all-you-need-35686.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://lethain.com/judgment-is-all-you-need/>)

Published: 2026-03-11T14:30:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Will Larson - Irrational Exuberance](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/will-larson-irrational-exuberance.md>)

Topics: [CI/CD](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cicd.md>), [Deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/deployment.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/migration.md>), [AI-assisted coding](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai-assisted-coding.md>), [Heroku](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/heroku.md>)

Tags: [coding-agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/coding-agents.md>), [continuous-deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/continuous-deployment.md>), [deployment](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/deployment.md>), [heroku](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migration.md>)

## AI overview

The author contrasts manual deployment and database migration practices at Imprint with a later workflow in which most changes continuously deploy to production after pull-request review and merge. The article connects this migration to broader reflections on how coding agents may affect software development.

## Source excerpt

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations were run manually, too. Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to detail to do it. It was also possible to develop good software using Subversion and developing by ssh'ing into a remote server to edit PHP files, but the goal is making things easy rather than possible. Ten months later, the vast majority of our changes, including database migrations, continuously deploy to production without human involvement after the initial pull request is reviewed and merged. Reading aloud the relevant pages from the mandated gospel of continuous deployment, deploying changes this way doesn't make them less reliable, but more so. Each step of validation a human might do, is now consistently done on every deploy, including many steps that are just onerous enough to drop off the standard operating steps like meticulously checking the post-launch health on a production canary every minute for half an hour after each deploy. This migration has reminded me a lot of the Uber service migration, which prompted me to write Migrations: the only scalable solution for technical debt back in 2018, and in particular how different this sort of migration feels in the age of coding agents. The more I've thought about how these two migrations compared, the more it's solidified my thinking a bit about how this technology is going to impact software development over the next few years. Migrations as metaphor Although I really want to talk about how coding agents are changing software development, I want to start by expanding a bit on this recent migration at Imprint and how it compared with the migration at Uber. The Uber migration was: Spinning up a new self-service service provisioning platform, along the lines of a very minimal Heroku, including the actual scheduling algorithm across cluste