The 5 Levels of Self-Driving Production — Eric Schwartz, Traversal
AI coding agents accelerate development but are shifting engineer time toward troubleshooting, not design.
“more and more time is spent on troubleshooting. Much more code is being written. People are less understanding of the code that goes into production.”
Traversal PM Eric Schwartz argues that while AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) have accelerated development 10x, they are creating a troubleshooting debt crisis — businesses spend $400B/year on bugs and engineers lose 7+ hours/week to incident response. Traversal positions its AI-for-SRE product as the solution for Fortune 500 companies facing this emerging complexity gap. The talk is primarily a vendor pitch, but the underlying tension between AI-generated code velocity and production reliability is a real and growing industry challenge.