Member-only story
I Replaced a Production Data Pipeline with AI Agents — Here’s What Actually Happened
Six weeks of zero downtime, zero pages, and zero regrets — a brutally honest breakdown of replacing our ETL pipeline with autonomous AI agents
The Slack notification woke me up. Our primary ETL pipeline had crashed. Again. Third time that week.
I did something that almost got me fired.
I replaced the entire thing with AI agents. Not assistants. Not copilots. Agents that made production decisions without asking permission.
My CTO thought I was insane. My team thought I had snapped from too many midnight incidents.
Six weeks later? The pipeline runs itself. Zero human intervention.
Sounds like hype, right? Wait until you hear about the agent that decided to reprocess six months of historical data during peak business hours. That almost ended my career.
This is what actually happened.
Why Everything Was Burning
Our data pipeline was a monument to technical debt.
We ingested customer events from five different sources: web analytics, mobile apps, payment processors, customer support tickets, and third-party integrations. Each source had its own special way of…
