Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Arjun Iyer
CEO and Co-Founder
October 8, 2026
In This Episode
Arjun Iyer is CEO and co-founder of Signadot, a Kubernetes-native platform that lets developers and coding agents test code changes against real environments.
Arjun joins Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta to argue that code validation has to happen before the merge, now that coding agents are writing much of the code. They cover why "merge is a contract," why mocks and unit tests aren't enough on their own, and why the PR has replaced the developer as the unit to govern. Arjun closes on where humans still belong once agents are writing and testing the code. Read more from Arjun here.
You’ll learn
A merge is a commitment to the rest of the organization. Merged code signals that it is ready for production, and other teams can begin building on it. Defects that get past pre-merge validation come back later as slower, more expensive rework.
Mocks and unit tests alone create false confidence. Arjun still sees a role for mocks, but he recommends validating each feature end to end against its real dependencies: other services, databases, message queues, and workflow systems such as Temporal.
Coding agents have made the staging bottleneck worse. When a thousand PRs land in staging and it breaks, no one can identify the change responsible, and debugging turns into a dispute between frontend and backend teams.
Test selection should follow the change. Because an agent knows what it modified, it can pick the 50 relevant tests from a suite of 10,000, across integration, end-to-end, performance, and security, and keep revising the code until they pass.
The PR has replaced the developer as the unit of governance. Developers used to average roughly 5 to 10 PRs per month. With background agents, a 50-person team could produce thousands, and validation infrastructure has to handle that volume.
Accountability stays with humans. People decide what to build, shape the design, and know where a system is likely to fail. Agents write the code and tests, but a person signs off before anything reaches production.
Quotes
Merge is a contract. When you merge code to a trunk branch, you're telling the engineering organization, 'This code is ready to go to production.
Arjun Iyer
CEO and Co-Founder
If staging fails and you merged a thousand PRs into it, you have no clue why it's broken. Who broke staging? That becomes the question of the hour.
Arjun Iyer
CEO and Co-Founder
Don't run 10,000 tests. Run the top 50 tests that pertain to the code change the agent just made.
Arjun Iyer
CEO and Co-Founder
Now, I can spin off 10 background agents for the 10 ideas I had in the last 10 minutes.
Arjun Iyer
CEO and Co-Founder
Timestamps
(02:06)
Arjun's background and what Signadot does
(03:55)
What validation means: can this code run in production?
(05:34)
Validating in local development and at the PR
(07:14)
Why mocks and unit tests aren't enough
(08:19)
“Merge” is a contract
(10:37)
How most orgs handle pre-merge testing today
(11:50)
Where to start defining your merge contract
(13:20)
Code is piling up at the PR
(15:11)
Independent deployability and the staging logjam
(19:00)
Picking the tests that matter for each change
(21:43)
Does CI still need to run everything?
(23:40)
The PR as the unit of governance
(26:09)
DRIVE and choosing the right unit to measure
(30:29)
Where humans belong in the loop
(36:38)
Advice for teams getting started
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