InfoQ series says AI agents will reshape how business software is built

InfoQ, a news site for software engineers, has published a five-part series arguing that AI agents will become a standard way to build business software. Its editors say this style will likely dominate the industry for years. An AI agent is a system that decides on steps and takes actions, instead of only answering a question.

What the series says

The articles are written by industry experts and are also offered as one PDF eMag. InfoQ compares the moment to the arrival of microservices and cloud-native computing, which shaped how companies built software over the last decade. It says the next decade will likely be spent learning to build a new generation of systems with AI.

It also warns about speed. InfoQ writes that last year's best practice is this year's antipattern. An antipattern is a habit that once seemed smart and now causes problems.

What the five articles cover

• Mallika Rao: how agents break work into decisions, plus new ways these systems can fail.
• Karthik Ramgopal: how agent building grew from experiments into production-grade designs.
• Adi Polak: context engineering, or giving the AI good information to reduce false answers.
• Subash Natarajan and Ahilan Ponnusamy: a three-tier design framework with industry examples.
• Rafał Gancarz: how this new style of software will change the IT industry.

Who it affects

The series is aimed at people who design and build software. But it touches any business that plans to use AI agents. Two themes stand out. One is observability, which means being able to see what a system is doing and why. The other is reliability, meaning the system keeps working as expected.

What is not known yet

InfoQ says it is impossible to fully describe this new type of software design at this point. It calls the field young and says it plans to keep tracking how it matures. The series is expert opinion and guidance, not a test or a rule. The material gives no results, costs or timelines.

What to do

Anyone planning to bring AI agents into daily operations should expect fast change. Favor setups that are easy to monitor and easy to swap out, so a tool that falls behind can be replaced without rebuilding everything.