Been working with software systems for more than 10 years, mostly around backend, cloud, AI, automation, and product development. One thing I’ve learned, knowing a programming language alone usually isn’t enough. The harder part is understanding the actual business. How to automate work that’s still manual. Connect systems that don’t work well together. Build AI into real workflows. Keep the backend stable when usage grows. Deal with data scattered across different tools. These are the kinds of problems I’ve spent a lot of time working on here in Japan. But I’m curious about the US side. For people running companies in the US, what technical skills are becoming difficult to find? And what skills do you think companies will need more of over the next few years?

Some great talks here at The Linux Foundation's Model Context Protocol Summit in Toronto, and great people as well! Great to see what people are working on too - MCP has proven to have staying power in a market that moves very quickly. It is at the heart of the client engagements I am doing right now, because it not only provides utility and value at multiple levels, but also has a great deployment story. If you're building with MCP, or thinking about it, feel free to DM or leave a comment 🙂

Getting an agent to complete a scripted task in a sandbox is exciting, but hooking it up to real backend logic and production repos is an entirely different beast. You watch it handle edge cases cleanly in testing, only for orchestration to break the second it hits real API boundaries or multi-step execution. Most of the friction isn't prompting anymore, it's managing the state and system around the agent so it doesn't drift. Where does your setup usually fall apart when moving from a cool prototype to a reliable production workflow?

I am an entrepreneur and a tech professional. Been working with software systems for quite a while, and one pattern comes up a lot. The first version works fine. Then customers grow, operations get bigger, and little technical problems start showing up everywhere. Too many manual steps. APIs that don’t talk properly. Slow backend. Data sitting in different places. AI added, but not really connected to the actual workflow. Usually not one huge problem. More like five small ones quietly costing time every day. For those running a company now, what’s becoming harder on the technical side as you grow?

Writing the code is getting faster. Keeping the agent focused on the right problem is becoming the harder part. My setup lately is claude.ai for working through the codebase, github.com for the actual code/history, and floment.ai for keeping the project, tasks, and next steps clear outside the agent. Feels like agentic development needs good project context almost as much as good prompts. How are you guys keeping agents aligned on longer builds?