Platforms for Humans and Machines: Engineering for the Age of Agents

As AI coding agents become first-class users of internal developer platforms, the practices that make platforms accessible to humans are proving to be the same ones that enable AI to thrive. Self-service interfaces, well-defined APIs with schemas and documentation, local-first workflows, and rich observability have always been important elements of a good platform. Now they are prerequisites for agents that can autonomously build, debug, and ship software.

This talk explores what it means to design platforms where both humans and AI can collaborate effectively. It covers:
• How to expose a platform as a product with structured APIs and perhaps MCPs
• Why prioritizing local tooling pays dividends when agents need to iterate on errors
• How observability becomes the bridge between runtime behavior and AI understanding

Transcript

1. NEXT GEN BANKING. POWERED BY THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY. Platforms for Humans and Machines PlatformCon 2026
2. Hi, I’m Juan • Cloud Native Tech @ Banking Circle • Third time in PlatformCon • Shoulders – OSS Opinionated Platform brew install jherreros/tap/shoulders
3. Next Gen Banking. Powered by the Latest Technology. Banking Circle • Global cross-border payments, accounts and liquidity management • Providing banking services to over 700 regulated financial institutions • €1 Trillion processed annually • 40% of our organisation workforce are engineers
4. Platform Engineering @ Banking Circle Atlas • Compute • Infrastructure • Messaging • Observability
5. So how do we make Platforms work for them? Agents are everywhere
6. Your product has a new user. It’s not human. If agents are going to sit between users and software, then your product needs to be accessible to them. Elena Verna, April 2026
9. Where is the agent? User Platform / Server AI AI
10. Agents just make the cost of ignoring them immediately visible Best practices are still best practices
11. Self-service • Automatic • No human involved • Intuitive
12. API-based • Discoverable • Schema validation • Auth
13. Local-first • Shift left • Let the agent work until it gets there • Tell it how to do and how to verify (o11y)
14. Documentation • Context • Docs next to code or via API • Agents.md, skills
15. Contributions • Encourage contributions • Guardrails for security, compliance, standards • Context for ease of use, DevEx
16. Summary 1.Self-service 2.API-based 3.Local-first 4.Documentation 5.Enable contributions
17. NEXT GEN BANKING. POWERED BY THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY. Thank you! Juan Herreros Elorza LinkedIn JuanHerreros.com GitHub