As enterprises accelerate their software delivery strategies, the need for streamlined tools and platforms is putting the developer experience in the spotlight.

The demands on today’s developers are intensifying — from managing AI-assisted workflows and fragmented toolchains to navigating multicloud deployments and aggressive release schedules. In this climate, platforms that remove operational friction while preserving flexibility are more than a convenience — they’re essential. Heroku is stepping into this space with renewed clarity, offering a developer-centric approach that blends simplicity, scalability and strong architectural foundations to support fast, sustainable innovation, according to Vish Abrams, chief architect of Heroku from Salesforce Inc.

“I think if you look at it, we’re in a similar space in the industry right now where the type of developer is changing and more people are recognizing the need to have a really stable foundation to build and deploy your applications,” he said.

Abrams and Betty Junod (pictured), chief marketing officer of Heroku from Salesforce, spoke with theCUBE’s Paul Nashawaty (left) at theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Heroku is evolving its platform to enhance the developer experience by reducing complexity, integrating AI agents and modernizing software delivery principles for today’s multicloud environments. (* Disclosure below.)

The evolution of the developer experience in the age of agents and abstraction

Heroku’s foundational principle has always been to minimize the undifferentiated heavy lifting for developers. That ethos continues today, even as new paradigms such as AI agents, multicloud integration and “vibe coding” reshape the software landscape. The pressure to adapt quickly doesn’t mean complexity has to scale in parallel, according to Junod.

Heroku’s Betty Junod talks with theCUBE about the developer experience.

“What’s kind of great is the core principles of what we founded Heroku on carry through with each evolution of technology,” she said. “It is about making sure that it continues to be easy for developers within the tools that they like to use … how can they gain access to these additional technologies, additional tooling for their process?”

Vibe coding introduces a new way to build software by turning natural language into code through AI. Heroku is responding with a modernized architecture approach, updating the Twelve-Factor App methodology to guide both developers and AI agents in creating scalable, maintainable applications, according to Abrams.

“The Twelve-Factor Manifesto was originally written back in around 2012, and it was congealing a lot of the lessons learned about running applications at scale from Heroku, how to build applications the right way so that they can be run at scale,” he said. “The reason that that’s interesting is because vibe coding has become this big thing that everybody’s talking about these days.”

This renewed focus on the developer experience is also driving a cultural shift — one that emphasizes human creativity alongside machine efficiency. As AI agents become more capable of generating and deploying code, developers are being asked to step further into roles that require design thinking, exception handling and strategic oversight. The future isn’t about replacing developers with automation but enabling them to work smarter within increasingly agent-augmented workflows.

“It’s about humans and software working together,” Junod noted. “As the agent is running the process, there’ll be things that don’t fit within the guardrails of the defined process and the defined variances … what you need is you need an exception where humans can participate.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit:

(* Disclosure: Heroku from Salesforce Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Heroku nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE