Coder & Rabbi, async. Former: StartupVet, DevBootCampGuru, Mentor, Consultant, Speaker, Author, ShorePHPFounder, NYPHPOrganizer. Now: Just trying to human well.
I refactor legacy coders.™
Joined December 2012
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Yitz Willroth™ retweeted
My software factory is shipping full features overnight, planned out with adversarial code reviews and CI at each step, and leaves me a comprehensive UAT checklist in one final PR so I can look everything over and test before I release. This is how I work now.
Yitz Willroth™ retweeted
Over a year ago, I stopped reading code and started automating adversarial agents to perform recursive code reviews instead.
The result: low-defect systems that do what I want. Can't believe anyone engaging seriously with these tools still believes human code review is superior
Yitz Willroth™ retweeted
There's been a lot of debate about AI vs human code review recently. Here's some actual data and observations from inside Meta:
- Engineers now push ~3x the code they did a year ago. Human review capacity obviously didn't triple.
- In an analysis involving 535k+ reviewed diffs, the production-incident rate for AI-reviewed diffs was 1/50th that of human reviewed.
- The revert rate for AI reviewed diffs was 1/3rd of the human reviewed.
- Median review wall time dropped by 35% compared to human-reviewed diffs.
- Experts then looked at every production incident caused by AI-approved diffs. A human reviewer wouldn't have caught any of those issues anyway in a manual review.
- Meta's internal coding agent lands ~3,000 diffs a week, and 59% need zero human edits.
Human review as default for most code changes is already obsolete, and might even be riskier.
Source in comment below.
Observations after a day at an "Enterprise AI" conference.
- Even the most monolithic companies are all in on a full agentic transition.
- Most are about a year behind what you are seeing on Twitter.
Takeaway for devs: it's not too late but it absolutely will be at some point.
Yitz Willroth™ retweeted
I don't think we need less software devs, but I do think if you're not fully embracing AI in your software dev work you're at a very high risk of being a casualty for someone who will. It's simply vastly more productive and if you're a holdout you simply can't keep up
Linear, like GitHub, is for the agents, and only because we don't have anything better.
For the first time, I think issue tracking is dying. At least for small teams.
After five years, I shut down our Linear workspace.
Every issue I'd file now goes one of two places.
If it's urgent enough to deserve tracking, it's urgent enough to hand to an agent right now. It comes back as a PR, not some card rotting in a backlog.
If it needs more product thinking than that, it belongs on our feedback board.
The issue tracker felt like the middle ground between them. I don't think that middle ground exists anymore.
These days my agent workspace is the tracker. What's running is what's being worked on. Nothing else needs a status.
This gets harder with a bigger team, I know. But these days, I'm seeing similar across my friends.
Took until a little Shabbos reflection time to have my "holy shit" moment — that I now lead product/engineering at a mid-size PE backed medical startup... the buck definitely stops here. Not sure how to end this but the feeling lasted all of about 10 minutes anyway. Back to work.
I have been so all-in on AI-tomating all the things driven by the single premise that it's "replace or be replaced" -- AI _will_ replace you if you aren't working to replace yourself with AI.
Stokers lost jobs at the end of the era of steam engines, Conductors didn't.
I regret to inform you that we suffered our third captured regression since abandoning human code review.
1 user impacted (specific edit permission missing), 16 minutes from report to remediation... human read some prose, said "yup, that would do it..." and pressed "approved".
This.
We are all learning here, so I’m in no position to tell you how you should write and review your code.
What I can tell you is what's working for the people I work with and me.
We aren't manually reading the code anymore. We don't care about individual lines. We don't have anybody trying to understand the thousands of AI-generated lines we get.
Instead, we have designed (and continue to invest here) automated processes to verify that we are shipping high-quality software,
The quality of our software hasn’t gone down in any way, shape, or form. We are delivering more and faster.
People are working the same amount of time, but the nature of their work has changed significantly.
I don't know what you are building and how you are doing it, so I'm not going to pretend I can speak about how you should do it.
If you find value in reading AI-generated code, good for you! If you think that's the best way for you to verify the software you build is good, then keep doing it.
Yitz Willroth™ retweeted
you used to write code by hand and when it didn’t work you had to go into the codebase and understand all the functions
sometimes people would go on for days about variable names and we would argue about what programming language was better
