Developers of the System, Not the Code: Inside Next Insurance's Agentic DLC w/ Shay Mandel

"We are now developers, not of the code. We are developers of the system."

Most AI coding rollouts end up with faster typing and the same delivery system. Shay Mandel's team at Ergo-Next Insurance went after the system instead. They broke the whole product development lifecycle into skills an agent runs — problem definition, PRD, engineering review, technical design, implementation, testing, code review — and told everyone to stop writing the artifacts and start fixing the thing that writes them.

00:00 Welcome, and why this conversation
00:31 Shay Mandel, Ergo-Next Insurance, and 200 people building product
03:46 What you should get out of this conversation
05:14 Breaking the development lifecycle into skills
06:37 The engineering review skill that runs before engineering reviews
08:38 How the engineers actually feel about it
10:40 Developers of the system, not of the code
11:11 Auto-improvement loops: pointing an agent at a KPI
14:21 Where humans still decide, and where they don't
21:21 Digital twins of your best insurance experts
22:20 Ask-engineering and ask-product agents across time zones
24:21 What changed in how the work is managed, and what didn't
29:24 Epic-level Kanban and flow metrics for human and agent handoffs
30:39 Advice for leaders starting the journey
31:32 Setting expectations: 60% to 95%, and why the last 5% needs a human
33:29 When you tell a PM to open a terminal, you lose them
35:24 Avoiding skill sprawl: one shared brain, not 200
37:44 Beyond product and engineering: actuaries, finance, HR

"They are not supposed to write anything on their own anymore. They just need to fix the skills or fix the context." - Shay Mandel

"The initial version will probably be sixty or seventy percent accurate, and we'll get to ninety or ninety-five. The extra five percent is why we need a human in the loop." - Shay Mandel

"You need to think from a product perspective, even about your AI harness and your AI capabilities." - Yuval Yeret

Links and resources
Shay on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaymandel/
Product Leaders AI meetup: https://luma.com/ProductLeaders.ai
Yuval's Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuvalyeret/
Scaling AI: From Activity to Impact — yuvalyeret.com/insights