Manufacturing trust: speed and safety in the age of agents

Agents have made building software faster, but infrastructure has to catch up. In the world we now live in, developers review code they did not write, or don’t review it at all. An agent can generate and execute changes faster than any person or team can inspect them. And while prompts and skills can steer an agent, they cannot guarantee trust. For decades, we established trust in software through people and process: shared context, code review, CI, and ownership, all of which run at human speed. Agents do not. If a person has to watch every step, the agent is not autonomous, and most of the promised speed disappears. Trust has to move into the system itself. Mark Cavage, President and COO of Docker, makes the case for enforceable boundaries around nondeterministic agents. When you can’t inherit trust, you have to manufacture it. That means isolating where agents run, limiting what they can reach, recording what they do, and making failures reproducible. These controls are not the price of moving fast. They are what let you move fast without losing control. The test for an agent platform is simple: Does security hold when the prompt does not? Can you audit what happened? Can you switch models and tools without rebuilding the trust layer? The goal is not to trust the agent. It is to trust the system around it enough to close your laptop, while the work continues.