Per-Developer Environments Were the Goal. Agents Moved the Goalposts.
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
When one developer runs five agent sessions, the tenancy unit has to become the change, not the person.
For sixty years the unit of tenancy kept shrinking, from organization to team to individual developer, and AI coding agents broke that progression by letting one person run many concurrent workstreams that each need isolated infrastructure.
The article argues the tenant must be redefined as the individual change rather than the person or agent producing it. Change-level tenancy needs three properties: near-free creation, isolation limited to what changed, and a lifecycle bound to the change itself.
Practically that means measuring capacity in changes-in-flight instead of headcount, using copy-on-write database branches, and offboarding automatically on merge. Teams keeping person-sized tenancy will watch agent-generated pull requests queue behind infrastructure built for lower throughput.