# The agentic future still runs on distributed systems

> AI lowers the barrier to persistent, adaptive automation—and raises the reliability demands placed on the systems underneath it.

Published: 2026-07-29
Reading time: 4 min read
Canonical URL: https://aidanmarshall.ai/writing/agentic-traffic-still-needs-systems-engineering/
Source: LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7488277184625905667/
Provenance: Personal observation
Provenance note: Adapted for aidanmarshall.ai from a post first published on LinkedIn. The observed outage is not presented as a verified root-cause analysis.

For roughly 30 minutes, a Pokémon card drop appeared to overwhelm major parts of the Sam's Club website. Product pages stopped loading, login systems failed, sessions broke, and even unrelated parts of the shopping experience appeared degraded. I cannot say what specifically caused the outage, but watching it happen was a useful reminder: the age of AI does not make traditional systems engineering less important. It makes it more important.

AI has lowered the barrier to building software that is persistent, adaptive, capable of navigating changing pages, able to retry intelligently, and able to run across many products and retailers. Infrastructure may need to handle thousands of automated clients reacting simultaneously, refreshing sessions, retrying requests, and competing for the same inventory.

The hard questions remain deeply rooted in systems engineering: isolate failures, protect authentication from traffic spikes, prevent retries from amplifying an outage, degrade gracefully, and separate legitimate customers from abusive automation without blocking both.

More capable automated clients put more pressure on the infrastructure beneath them. Queues, rate limits, circuit breakers, observability, capacity planning, and failure isolation remain the practical defenses.

## Topics

Agentic AI, Systems engineering, Distributed systems, Reliability