Governance In The Age Of AI: A Conversation With Sarah Wells
InfoQ, Monday, July 13th, 2026
Governance acts as an enabler, and architectural skills grow critical as AI agents take on more coding work.
Sarah Wells discusses how governance functions as an enabling mechanism rather than bureaucratic red tape, particularly within platform engineering teams.
She emphasizes that governance should establish guardrails guiding developers toward correct practices without obvious enforcement.
Wells argues that as AI agents become capable of writing code, experienced engineers must validate outputs, establish clear architectural guidelines, and require AI agents to critically evaluate their own work.
She highlights the value of checklists, inspired by aviation and medicine, for reducing cognitive overload during high-pressure situations such as incident response.