Lisa Orr, engineering leader at Zapier, presents how the company combats "app erosion" by empowering support teams to ship code. Using the Grand Canyon analogy - where natural erosion creates beauty over millions of years - she contrasts it with app erosion, which continuously degrades Zapier's 8,000+ integrations built over 14 years.
The problem is critical: third-party APIs change constantly, creating a backlog crisis where tickets arrive faster than they can be resolved. This generates reliability issues, poor customer experience, and potential churn. Faced with this reality, Zapier launched two parallel experiments two years ago.
Experiment 1 transforms the support role: from simple triage to active bug fixing. The approach is cautious, with guardrails: focus on 4 target apps, mandatory engineering review, limited to app fixes. The motivation is strong because erosion represents a major source of bugs, support is eager to learn (many want to become engineers), and some members were already helping informally.
Experiment 2 - Scout uses generative AI to accelerate fixes. The process begins with "dog fooding" (Orr herself fixes apps), observing engineers and support, and identifying pain points. Key discovery: 50% of the time is spent gathering the context needed to understand the problem.
Scout's architecture comprises three main components: 1. Context Analyzer: Automatically gathers tickets, error logs, API documentation, source code 2. Diff Generator: Creates fixes based on the analyzed context 3. Test Generator: Generates tests to validate the fixes
The results are remarkable. The merge request success rate reaches 97%, with only 3% requiring minor modifications. Resolution time drops from 72 hours to a few minutes. The cultural impact is profound: support feels valued, engineering is freed up for innovation, and the boundary between roles blurs.
Orr emphasizes that this transformation is not merely a technical optimization but a strategic necessity. In an ecosystem where integrations are central and erosion is inevitable, the capacity for agile maintenance becomes a competitive advantage. Empowering support through AI represents a fundamental organizational evolution for surviving in a world of perpetually changing APIs.