Figma for Agents: How Airflow's Creator Coordinates AI ft. Maxime Beauchemin

elseif has not written about this yet · Data Engineering Blog & Second Brain describes it this way

It’s hard to keep up with the AI evolution; new AI tools drop every week, but how are experienced practitioners actually using them? Most of us are overwhelmed and unsure about the many possibilities, yet we need to keep going and do our work. You might use AI agents all day long, parallelize them with AI Orchestrators, tmux, git worktree, and so on, using AI IDEs, but in the end, you still need to coordinate and understand what the agents produced, potentially test it, which makes it even harder to keep up. Luckily, Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Airflow and Superset and the person who defined what “data engineer” meant for a decade (more on him below), joins us to show how he uses agents and what he’s built for working with them. I tried to extract the patterns behind how he actually uses AI in his data work today. This is the fourth interview in ‘How to use AI with DE’. In this article, we go into four parts: (1) How to balance quality with messy data warehouse work, and how to manage agents with Figma for agents. (2) We elaborate on the future of the context layer and the return to semantics, (3) how Okta for Agents is needed for security, and (4) how the future of agentic w