The developer as conductor: Leading an orchestra of AI agents with the feature flag baton

Last month, just a few weeks after Dynatrace finalized its acquisition of DevCycle, Michael Beemer of Dynatrace and Andrew Norris, co-founder and former CEO of DevCycle, joined The New Stack Makers podcast to discuss how feature flagging is becoming the essential “safety net” for the AI era.

And if you’re into orchestra metaphors, keep reading.

Beemer, a Senior Product Manager at Dynatrace, and Norris, now a Principal Product Manager at Dynatrace, unpack in this episode how the integration of DevCycle’s feature flagging capabilities into the Dynatrace observability platform creates, in Norris’s words, a “360-degree view” of software performance.

For Norris, the merger solves a critical visibility gap: “Being able to bring DevCycle capabilities natively into the Dynatrace platform will allow us to give a complete 360-view, at a feature level, of what’s happening,” said Norris.

The rise of “agentic development” — where AI agents generate a lot of code very quickly — is likely to create problems and bugs, and it already is. Norris explains that feature flags allow teams to embrace this fast-but-flawed technology without sacrificing quality.

“The real role the developer is going to be a conductor — conducting an orchestra of agents.”

“It’s really de-risking and accelerating the adoption at an enterprise software level of using these agenetic development tools that are augmenting teams,” Norris says in our interview. He added that flags allow a “human in the loop” to approve AI-generated code in live environments before a full release.

Beemer highlights the importance of industry standards, specifically the Cloud Native Computing Foundation project Open Feature, which aims to prevent vendor lock-in. “We wanted to try to standardize how developers worked with feature flags in their code, regardless of the back end,” Beemer says.

As AI continues to change the workflow, Norris predicted a fundamental shift in the developer’s identity. Referring to a concept from Dynatrace’s Alois Reitbauer, Norris put it this way, borrowing Reitbauer’s music metaphor:

“The real role the developer is going to be a conductor — conducting an orchestra of agents.”

In this regard, feature flags are the developer’s conducting “baton,” allowing them to orchestrate agents while keeping precise control.

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