Most enterprises never fully finished the DevOps transformation they started a decade ago. Agentic coding is now surfacing every place that was left unfinished. Builds still take hours. Test suites are flaky. Releases are still gated by manual steps. An AI coding agent that has to sit idle for eight hours waiting on feedback is not just slow — it is an extremely expensive kind of slow, burning tokens and calendar time on the same pipeline gaps DevOps was supposed to close years ago.
Moritz Plassnig, the newly returned CEO of CloudBees, joins Alan Shimel to explain what he saw during five years away at Immuta and why he came back. Watching large language models reshape how customers worked with data reignited his interest in the delivery side of the problem, and he argues agentic coding is DevOps’s second chance to actually deliver on the original promise. The gap is no longer that teams disagree that DevOps is real — it is that most companies never went all the way, and the shortcuts they took are now the ceiling on how fast agents can work.
Plassnig’s recipe is direct. Take the rules an organization already lives by — two-human review on any code change, whatever the specific policies are — and encode them as versioned policy that a central governance engine can enforce across CloudBees, Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab or whatever coding tool a team picks. He shares a striking data point from a very large bank: technology planning horizons have compressed from five to ten years down to two to three, which means standardization is losing to a curated menu of approved tools that a governance layer holds together.
If code generation is no longer the constraint, the next bottleneck is getting software into production safely — and Plassnig is blunt that AI-scale development needs AI-scale governance or the mismatch becomes catastrophic. Supply chain risk compounds with every automated step, and the organizations that pretend policy can stay manual are the ones that will discover the hard way that agents scale faster than any human review process ever could.