"Human in the loop won't work"!

"Developers passing on tribal code base knowledge is over!"

"Pair Programming still matters!"

"Refactoring is not dead!"

"We should stop calling things CD!"

Wait, that last one is quite reasonable. (Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Design, Compact Disc, Certificate of Deposit...)

This was a really great conversation! Chris has been thinking hard about the impacts AI is having on software engineering, and it showed!

Books, blogs and other resources we mentioned:

Working Effectively with Legacy Code (WELC)

Continuous Deployment

The Phoenix Architecture - Chad Fowler's writing on AI

As usual, thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

Tim Cochran, Principal for Amazon Software Builder Experience, is no stranger to software development; in enterprise, scaleups and in startups. He’s well known for articles like Maximizing Developer Effectiveness, Measuring Developer Productivity via Humans, which focus on in developer experience, and Bottlenecks of Scaleups, a wide ranging series that focused on the challenges startups have as they scale up to become larger businesses.

As always, special thanks to our sponsor Navalia for their support as a founding sponsor!

Sharan Karanth is Principal Engineer and Head of Engineering at Binaxity, an "Invest now pay later" startup in Toronto. He talks us through how their team is using AI; what guardrails they have in place (human guardrails in this case!), how their engineering process works. Sharan went fairly deep in to the process, you can tell he's definitely still coding at Binaxity.

More on Binaxity: https://www.binaxity.com/

As always, thanks to our Founding Sponsors, Navalia! https://navalia.io

Cassie was just back from a week in Utah with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Tim Cochran (next week's guest!) and too many cool people to list when we spoke. We covered everything from why it feels like we're testing all the time now, to an exploration of how "maybe refactoring is dead?"

For more on what RelationalAI is doing with knowledge graphs, check out https://relational.ai

As always, big thanks to our Founding Sponsor, Navalia.io!

John Jarosz is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Sightglass Partners, a product and technology studio that helps ambitious companies identify and create solutions that fulfil unmet needs.

We talked about how Sightglass uses GenAI through market entry analysis, product design and how the tools help his business and his customers.

https://sightglasspartners.com/

This sounds like a silly click bait joke, and it kind of is. It’s also just how Aravindh works - ever since I’ve known him (close to 20 years at this point) he’s had this intense work habit. I admire how he does it; he knows not to get too far ahead of his team mates, for instance - so me might spend 20 hours learning something new for fun, 20 hours on a side project (like the algorithmic trading bot he built), and only work 50 or so hours a week or so on his main job.

All of this to say, setting down tools that make you arguably more productive 28% of the time is showing intense restraint - and I admire this about him, too. Aravindh swears by it - it helps him have a much better sense of the codebase that he and his GenAI tools are making. It also helps that he’s one of the best software developers I’ve ever worked with. He balances confidence, expertise and the openness of the “beginners mind” like no one I’ve known.

The other thing he talked about in our interview makes new use of an existing axiom - that you should “own the seams”. In this interview, Aravindh argues that we should prioritize working closely with our GenAI tools to define REST interfaces, service contracts, classes, interfaces, traits and so on, and exert slightly less control over how it works between these seams.

“Own the seams” often gets used when talking about systems integration; that if you use IBM’s Websphere Commerce (which has the shopping cart) and also Sterling’s Order Management System (which manages the order that the cart becomes), try to not let these two important packaged systems to talk directly to another. Even placing a thin shim of a proxy between them begins to give you some control - and better yet, place some kind of adapter between them to prevent Sterling from becoming aware of or dependent on Websphere Commerce’s internal domain jargon and vice versa.

This particular use of owning the seams flips it on its head a little bit - instead of enterprise software teams placing domain facades between two massive packaged software systems in order to have more control, its you exerting control over your GenAI coding tools in order to have more control over your code.

Spoken like someone who spends 28% of his week working in his code base by hand!

As always, thanks to our Founding Sponsor, Navalia!

The “long working hours” part of this story definitely deserves a “don’t try this at home” warning - it won’t work for everyone. I do think it works for Aravindh, though.

Philip Sears is the GenAI Enablement Lead at Grainger, where he helps engineering teams integrate AI tools across the software development lifecycle through strategy, evaluation, and hands-on learning.

In this episode, he talks about how Grainger rolls out AI using a four-phase adoption model, measuring AI value beyond raw developer speed and how it’s beneficial across the SDLC at enterprise.

As always, special thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

https://navalia.io

As an early devotee of Test Driven Development, Jeff Langr is the author of Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit, Modern C++ Programming with Test-Driven Development, and co-author of Clean Code.

Jeff is currently leading a team at Jack in the Box, and his team loves the mob code sessions he leads.

If you want to follow Jeff about his AADV technique, check out his Substack.

https://jjlangr.substack.com/

As always, special thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

https://navalia.io

Our second interview, Pete Hodgson is an independent software delivery consultant in the San Francisco area. Pete has used a number of different approaches to AI as part of his workflow, and often helps teams get to the next level when working with AI as part of his consulting practice.

It's a great conversation, he comes up with quite a few ideas on how to ease context management through automation, scripting, and providing context at the right time.

You can find Pete here:

https://thepete.net/

As always, special thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

https://navalia.io

Ahmad Nassri sees a lot of promise in LLM based coding models, and talks us through the techniques, tools and approaches he takes personally, and that he sees teams taking when working with AI tools today.

Our first, in person interview on Engineering With AI, Ahmad is the CTO of Socket (socket.dev), a leader in Software Composition Analysis tooling.

https://www.ahmadnassri.com/

https://socket.dev/

As always, special thanks to our founding sponsor, Navalia!

https://navalia.io