DevTool Founders Build Agent-First Tools

Agent-First Product Design

Founders redesign products for AI agents as main users. They add CLIs, skills, and exportable data. Infisical creates agents for marketing, sales, infrastructure, and DevOps. Mintlify redesigns documentation to fit coding agents' context windows, reducing integration errors. Firecrawl and others prioritize agent experiences alongside developer UIs from day one. Greptile reviews over three billion lines of code monthly for Nvidia and Coinbase, flagging bugs and anti-patterns.

They ruthlessly delete obsolete features due to rapid AI changes. Early mistake: over-focusing on perfect UIs instead of fast aha moments and efficiency. Another: being too generic with APIs rather than opinionated.

Shifts in Coding and Founder Habits

Founders use coding agents for most production code. One reports 90% of code comes from Claude and Cursor, with humans reviewing; total code volume increases. Founders write prompts, review agent-generated PRs, or code for fun after toil reduction. Engineer managers now code alongside people management.

They rebase assumptions by hands-on use of Cursor, Copilot, Claude. No single best agent; preferences split like IDEs, leading to a long tail of specialized agents for roles like finance or support contributing code.

Unexpected Insights and Predictions

Agents recommend tools: coding models suggest Recall.ai, driving customers. Agents critique plans using thousands of support tickets for better prioritization. Custom vulnerability agents outperform prior detection.

Underrated: open models catching up efficiently; strategy critique via agents reveals thinking gaps; quality focus. Predictions include agent-driven signups and compute use at 100x human scale; parallel 100-feature dev; incident response autonomy; non-engineers automating industries; idea-only programming; full autonomy path; engineers more valuable via faster, higher-quality software.