In this VMblog pre-show Q&A ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026, Nicky Pike, Field CTO at Coder, explains why every developer now has the equivalent of three to five new “interns” in the form of AI agents, and why those agents often run as root with the developer’s keys to everything. That’s a major reason AI coding pilots get stuck at security review.

Pike, a former Air Force C-141 crew chief, lays out Coder’s approach: self-hosted development infrastructure that gives developers and their agents a governed, consistent place to work inside your own cloud or data center.

In this interview, Nicky Pike covers:

• Why “works on my machine” still persists, and why AI has turned up the volume on old problems like slow onboarding, inconsistent laptops, and long-running agent jobs
• Coder’s three-step customer journey: migrate development off laptops, modernize with tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex, then multiply by running agents side by side
• A real-world story of a US intelligence platform that moved to a single multi-tenant Coder platform, achieving one Authority to Operate (ATO) instead of one per team and giving new teams a pre-approved environment on day one
• How Coder’s “control, choice, and consistency” thesis differs from the inference- and GPU-focused conversations on the expo floor
• Coder’s AI Gateway for visibility into spend by person, agent, and model, and Agent Firewall for controlling what each agent can reach
• Trends shaping the roadmap: agent identity, GPU scheduling, FinOps and token costs, open-weight models, and data sovereignty
• Agent Relay, a partnership with Anthropic and Cursor that lets developers work in familiar interfaces while agent execution runs in a Coder workspace on their own infrastructure

Visit Coder at KubeCon NA 2026: Booth 195

• Coder Workspaces: full dev environments on Kubernetes, VMs, or bare metal, ready in minutes
• Coder Agents: hand a job to an agent in its own walled-off workspace and trace every action
• Agent Firewall and AI Gateway: live rules and records of what agents access
• Coder Academy: new free, hands-on courses on cloud development environments
• Gene Kim book signing: Wednesday, November 11, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. MT

Coder sessions at KubeCon NA 2026:

• Monday, November 9, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. MT: Dave R. at the AISRE meetup on keeping AI workloads up and safe, and what platform teams own when running agents
• Wednesday, November 11, 11:00 to 11:30 a.m. MT: Marco Martinez on building a developer community businesses can’t ignore

Learn more about Coder:

Website: coder.com
Open source: github.com/coder/coder
Enterprise demo: coder.com/demo

Back to: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026