Day 2 · Recorded 7 May 2026

How incident.io designs background agents people actually work with

The hard part is not just giving a background agent a channel. It is making the agent's work fit the rhythms of responders in Slack, engineers in IDEs, and other agents already paired with those humans. Lawrence Jones uses incident.io's AI SRE to show what real collaboration feels like when the agent is part of the team workflow.

Lawrence Jones, Founding Engineer, incident.io

What's in this session

Background agents do not create value just by producing output. In incident response, their work has to be visible, timely, trusted, and available wherever responders are actually working.

Lawrence Jones walks through AI SRE as a worked example: pinned Slack summaries, multiple summary formats, full-investigation canvases, threaded progress updates with citations, rules for proactive heads-up messages, IDE bridges through MCP tools, and Investigation Sync for moving incident context into local agent workspaces.

For product, platform, and engineering leaders, the lesson is to design the handoff surface as carefully as the agent itself. Clear boundaries, native channels, real-time bridges, and high-fidelity agent-to-agent handoffs turn background agents from isolated automation into collaborators.

Inside the recording

  1. 00:00 AI SRE as a worked example
    Lawrence frames background agents as collaborators with humans and their paired local agents.
  2. 04:00 Channels are the agent interface
    Choosing Slack creates constraints around message length, visibility, and how responders consume work.
  3. 09:00 Designing summaries people actually use
    Incident responders need skim-friendly updates, deeper canvases, and formats shaped by research.
  4. 12:00 Progress messages with citations
    AISRE formats every check consistently so people can read, trust, and inspect the work.
  5. 16:00 Be where engineers work
    Slack is not enough, so incident context syncs into IDEs and local agent workspaces.
  6. 20:00 Handoff to delegated coding agents
    Central specialist agents need clean transfer paths into the code agents teams already use.