AI agents are everywhere right now. But are they actually working inside real engineering teams?
At AngelList’s Founders Cafe, I sat down with founders of Cognition ($898M raised), Semgrep ($204M raised), Factory ($70M raised), and Composio ($29M raised) to talk about what agentic engineering looks like in practice.
There’s a lot of hype around AI coding tools, but the reality is more nuanced. Some teams are moving 10x faster, others are slowing down. A big part of it comes down to whether your codebase is actually “agent-ready” (linting, type systems, guardrails, etc).
We also went deep on security, which is one of the biggest gaps right now. As more non-developers start “vibe coding,” the risk surface grows fast. We talked about MCP access control, layered security, and why you can’t rely on models alone to generate secure code.
Enterprise teams are also dealing with the operational side of this shift. They have to manage cost, run evals, and help thousands of engineers use these systems well. Tools like PR review agents, model routing, and internal orchestration are quickly becoming part of the stack.