The Mindset way / Build your difference, not your plumbing

What to look for in a platform

Barrie Hadfield, CEO & Co-founder Last updated October 3, 2026

If you rent the plumbing, the platform has to fit the way modern software teams work, or nobody will use it. These are the five things I would insist on.

It works with the AI tools your team already uses.

Many developers now write software with AI coding assistants. The same assistant that changes your product should be able to set up and change your agents, following rules your team agrees once. I run more than ten agents this way myself.

Your agents stay in your hands.

This is not a drag-and-drop tool. Each agent's design is stored alongside your own software and reviewed like any other change, while the platform does the running. This means the agent is in your source code. The platform's job is to be the runtime environment that holds the plumbing. As a developer, I feel a lot better that way.

The whole team can take part, safely.

Product managers tired of waiting for engineering will find a way around it, and in Beyond Vibe Coding I called that one of the riskiest habits in software today. The better answer is to give them a safe place to change and try an agent, while someone responsible for security decides what goes live, just as they would sign off any other change.

The rules are set once.

Administrators decide how personal data is handled, which actions need a person's approval and how long records are kept, and the platform applies those rules to every agent. The next customer security review then meets answers already in place, not a new project. Passwords and keys are never exposed to the AI, and the audit trail cannot be altered.

Improvement happens where the agents live.

The people watching how customers use an agent can see what it did and what it cost, test a change against real conversations, then put it live or roll it back without waiting for a product release.