3 posts tagged with "Engineering"

When pods crash at odd hours, you need an AI that investigates like an SRE, not a chatbot. You need something that checks the right things, in the right order, tells you what it found, and waits for your call before touching anything. Current tools either dump a wall of logs on you and say "good luck," or run opaque automations you can't see, can't trust, and can't explain in a postmortem.

We spent the last several months designing and building Nova's investigation engine. This post is about the approach we took, the mental models that shaped it, and the trade-offs we made along the way.

Every AI agent demo looks the same. The model calls a tool, gets a result, responds. Ship it. Then you try to run it against real infrastructure — and the demo falls apart in ways nobody warned you about.

We've spent over a year building Nova, an AI agent that operates real infrastructure for real teams. Not a chatbot that wraps API calls, but a system that investigates incidents, executes remediations, and composes across dozens of integrations. This post is about what we learned — the problems that made us rebuild entire subsystems, and the patterns that survived.

Platform teams carry operational knowledge that doesn't transfer easily. The debugging instincts, the service interdependencies, the deployment quirks — they accumulate over years and live in a small number of people's heads. When those people are unavailable, the gap shows.

We built Nova to encode that operational knowledge into a queryable system. This post covers what the architecture looks like and what we learned building AI that actually operates infrastructure.