The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source Building the machine that builds the machine (Interview)
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Feb 11, 2026 Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData and time-series systems engineer. He recounts running agentic coding side quests, porting PromQL into Rust and validating it against real tests. He explores verification-first workflows, building bespoke delivery and QA tooling, and where agentic development breaks down and needs manual auditing.
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Agent Built PromQL Port
- Paul Dix ran AI agents to implement PromQL by porting Prometheus's Go implementation into Rust using the Prometheus test suite as verification.
- The agent-produced Rust implementation reached passing tests and matched Prometheus results in a Grafana comparison, despite Paul not writing a single line of the 60,000 generated lines of code.
Code Is Cheap; Verification Isn’t
- Code generation is now cheap and abundant, making verification and delivery the dominant bottlenecks.
- Paul Dix argues teams must optimize testing, product validation, and support rather than code production.
Make Tests Agent-Executable
- Build comprehensive verification suites that agents can run and validate automatically.
- Expose clear signals and command-line tools so agents can iterate on tests, performance, and regressions without continuous human intervention.