# O'Reilly's Andrew Odewahn details an AI research agent that flags toil and tech debt

> Original title: Getting Smarter, Not Just Faster

- Source: O'Reilly Radar
- Published: 2026-10-30T16:54:16.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/gq41xf0l89akzwcovxk1ft17l
- Original: https://www.oreilly.com/radar/getting-smarter-not-just-faster/

## Summary

Andrew Odewahn, CTO of O'Reilly Media, described a research agent that connects to the company's Productboard, Jira, GitHub, service catalog, and observability tools through MCP. The agent's analysis changed from recommending a hire to calling the team's overhead problem structural, after its Expert Intelligence layer applied Google's concept of toil. The team followed its recommendations to run a toil audit and closed a substantial part of its backlog.