Joseph Wang and Sid Patllollu argue that completing a code change captures only part of a software engineer's work. Their joint talk identifies a training-data gap around understanding customer problems, operating infrastructure and managing the consequences of architecture decisions over long periods.
Joseph Wang and Sid Patllollu describe simulated company environments containing projects, incidents, customer conversations and operational history. In a distributed-cluster example, an agent must combine that context with rolling deployments, failing nodes, monitoring and live traffic, while limiting the impact of its actions.
Joseph Wang and Sid Patllollu explain where a single-node sandbox becomes insufficient for realistic infrastructure work. They outline multi-node environments with access to cloud resources, covering provisioning, networking, authentication, authorization, deployment management and other parts of a service's lifecycle.
Joseph Wang and Sid Patllollu discuss challenges such as slow environment setup, resource costs and the remaining gap between simulated conditions and real customer traffic. They present infrastructure as a starting domain with clearer operational requirements, while considering whether lessons from that domain can transfer to broader agent workflows.
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