Always-on agents run production without the on-call tax — Justin Smith, Resolve AI
70% of engineer time goes to running production, not writing code, and AI is making this worse.
“AI is creating a lot more issues in production as, you know, AI code sort of goes through.”
Resolve AI's Justin Smith argues that AI-assisted coding is accelerating code shipping but exacerbating the real bottleneck: running production systems, which already consumes 70% of engineer time. He positions always-on AI agents as the solution to absorb the growing operational burden — incidents, runbooks, escalations — without adding on-call overhead. The insight that AI is generating more production problems than it solves is a counternarrative worth tracking.