There is a lot of fanfare about agentic development at the moment. I was interviewing an engineering leader last week about the fundamentals of modern apps and the response was pretty… interesting.

“Why does it matter if the agent can ensure the fundamentals are followed?”

Oof. In this era, when development is increasingly democratized, and developers can work faster and more easily than ever - the key principles are more important than ever.

Last night's community webinar with Jad El-Zein, from VMware couldn’t have been more timely for everything I am afraid off.

If we envision a simplified idea of the platform engineering goals for modern AppDev.

• Improve developer experience
• Reduce cognitive load
• Increase reliability, compliance, and safety
• Deliver applications faster

These are all things that you can help drive agentically, but at the end of the day if the humans involved aren’t keeping all 4 at the heart of what they’re doing. (Not just all in on #4 speed;)

So what does Jad propose as the key principles to ensure the right balance of these 4 goals?

• Cloud-native, composable, API-first architectures: Build your apps like Lego blocks instead of one giant piece of concrete. Clear APIs let those blocks talk to each other cleanly, so you can swap, scale, or fix parts without breaking everything.
• Declarative, GitOps-driven delivery and operations: Describe what you want your systems to look like in code and let automation keep them that way. Git becomes your single source of truth, so every change is tracked, reversible, and transparent.
• Observability and closed-loop automation: Don’t just collect data. Actually understand what your system is doing and WHY. Then use that insight to automatically adjust and improve things (hopefully before people notice problems).
• Zero trust security, compliance, and resilience by design: Assume nothing is safe. Verify everything, limit access tightly, and bake security into the system from day one instead of bolting it on later.

And number 5? DUH. Platform engineering as the foundation. Build your internal platform that makes the “right way” the easy way for developers. The goal is to remove friction and cognitive overload so teams can focus on building great products, not fighting infrastructure.

Whether your development is 100% human, or AI augmented humans, or 100% agentic. These principles are fundamental.

Even more so if you don’t have active thinking humans at each step of the process.

If anything, the faster we move, the more disciplined we need to be about architecture, delivery, observability, security, and platform design. The tools may evolve (dramatically) but the responsibility to design resilient, reliable, and dev-friendly systems still sits with us.

Jad & VMware have it spot on. Fundamentals aren’t optional in an agentic world, they’re what make the speed possible.