Jul 15, 2026 · 43 min · 15 segments
In this episode of Across The Funnel, Adil Saleh sits down with Mathias Biilmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify, to explore why domain experts, not professional developers, are on track to build most…
Mathias BiilmannGuestAdil SalehHost
First of all, I wrote this article in January 25 called AX or agent experience and why it matters.
Talking about back in the 90s, Don Norman coined the term UX as user experience.
It became a really big shift in how we think about building software in the sense that before that, you would think more of a software as a feature checklist.
Does it have this feature or not? They really changed the mentality into there's some user that's going to onboard into this software with manuals and installation and user interface and an actual experience.
And that experience is going to matter probably even more than the feature list, right? And it really changed how we thought a lot about digital products.
And then in the 2010 or so, Jeremiah coined the term developer experience, sort of saying like when developers augment all of these platforms or build new products, there's also an experience that like, again, similar before that people would think like, is there an API or is there an SDK? And now it became like, oh, there's a real experience of learning it and so on.
And I think I was very quick to see that the same would happen with agents being consumer of our platform, right? Like for the first time we would have this non-human entity that essentially have some experience, right? Like that's trying to reason and figure stuff out and needs to onboard and so on.
So I coined that term AX, like both to coin the term, but more importantly to sort of reorient my whole team internally around this is a shift from our North Star being developer experience to our north star of our project being the agent experience.
How well does Netlify work with these agents and the humans that are using them? And that's why I think we're seeing two approaches diverge.
I think there's one view that is like our audience is now we're building for agents and that's it.
That's sort of like imagining almost like an autonomous economy 2.0 that's entirely agent driven.
That's just like buying, using, building platforms, building products and so on.
But there is another view, which is the one I would say I even tried to fight for, which is that these agents are only doing stuff in so far as it serves some human in their purpose or their imagination or in their quest to reach other humans or connect with other humans or do business with other humans.
And there is no real purpose in just having a bunch of agents do things on their own, right? Yeah.
Agent-built community, like sort of a community of agents that have different capabilities, knowledge base, different goals, different industry vertical, and they're all collaborating, like any community.
But I think my point is that you can either think about it as pure agents working with each other and our product just being for them.
Or you can think about there's always a human somewhere on the other side, hopefully, and we're building our product for them.
So our agent experience is still fundamentally a human experience, right? Like someone that comes to our product and is using cloud code, a cursor or a combination of like lovable and cloud code and like a Grok builder and Google Design Studio, what is their experience having all of these agents do stuff that involves Netlify, but still tracing it back to that human experience, right? And that's sort of our bit in the market that those humans are going to matter.
And that those humans are the real people, like, yes, the real agency in this.
But like, if I took the other bet and I won, I would still feel like I lost.
First of all, I wrote this article in January 25 called AX or agent experience and why it matters.
Talking about back in the 90s, Don Norman coined the term UX as user experience.
It became a really big shift in how we think about building software in the sense that before that, you would think more of a software as a feature checklist.
Does it have this feature or not? They really changed the mentality into there's some user that's going to onboard into this software with manuals and installation and user interface and an actual experience.
And that experience is going to matter probably even more than the feature list, right? And it really changed how we thought a lot about digital products.
And then in the 2010 or so, Jeremiah coined the term developer experience, sort of saying like when developers augment all of these platforms or build new products, there's also an experience that like, again, similar before that people would think like, is there an API or is there an SDK? And now it became like, oh, there's a real experience of learning it and so on.
And I think I was very quick to see that the same would happen with agents being consumer of our platform, right? Like for the first time we would have this non-human entity that essentially have some experience, right? Like that's trying to reason and figure stuff out and needs to onboard and so on.
So I coined that term AX, like both to coin the term, but more importantly to sort of reorient my whole team internally around this is a shift from our North Star being developer experience to our north star of our project being the agent experience.
How well does Netlify work with these agents and the humans that are using them? And that's why I think we're seeing two approaches diverge.
I think there's one view that is like our audience is now we're building for agents and that's it.
That's sort of like imagining almost like an autonomous economy 2.0 that's entirely agent driven.
That's just like buying, using, building platforms, building products and so on.
But there is another view, which is the one I would say I even tried to fight for, which is that these agents are only doing stuff in so far as it serves some human in their purpose or their imagination or in their quest to reach other humans or connect with other humans or do business with other humans.
And there is no real purpose in just having a bunch of agents do things on their own, right? Yeah.
Agent-built community, like sort of a community of agents that have different capabilities, knowledge base, different goals, different industry vertical, and they're all collaborating, like any community.
But I think my point is that you can either think about it as pure agents working with each other and our product just being for them.
Or you can think about there's always a human somewhere on the other side, hopefully, and we're building our product for them.
So our agent experience is still fundamentally a human experience, right? Like someone that comes to our product and is using cloud code, a cursor or a combination of like lovable and cloud code and like a Grok builder and Google Design Studio, what is their experience having all of these agents do stuff that involves Netlify, but still tracing it back to that human experience, right? And that's sort of our bit in the market that those humans are going to matter.
And that those humans are the real people, like, yes, the real agency in this.
But like, if I took the other bet and I won, I would still feel like I lost.
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