AI adoption requires redesigning teams and codebases

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:34:24

   So you build this product and it's now, it's a production software. You're merging poor because people are using it. Now, thinking back to PSPDFKit and companies that are like that, which have, you know, like tens or hundreds of developers working on production software, knowing what you know with how you're building CloudBot and the tools that you're using, how do you think software engineering at those larger companies could change?

2. 1:34:49

   Because one thing I see is for individual people like you, it's like AI is really, really hitting a fit. Like you're making you way more productive. You're in control. At teams or at companies that are, you know, have existing code, it's just a lot kind of slower. It's not really, okay, people use it for this or that. But it seems a huge divide between the two worlds. And you've kind of been the CEO for this company.

3. 1:35:12

   What might that be? Or is it just more of a timing thing where every user technology often comes with hobbies, you know, pick it up earlier? I think companies will have a really high time adopting AI efficiently because this also requires to completely redefine how the company works. You know, like at Google, they tell you you can either be an engineer or like a manager, or you want to also like define how the UI looks.

4. 1:35:38

   That role doesn't exist because either you build it or you design it. But this new world needs people that have a product vision. that can be able to do everything and you need like far fewer of them but ultimately just very high agency and high competency people. But you can probably trim the company down to like 30%, which is very scary because, I mean, economically this will all lead into a fiasco, and a lot of people will have trouble finding a place in this new world, but I'm not the least surprised that current companies cannot very successfully use AI.

5. 1:36:26

   I mean, they do to a degree, but you have to do a big refactor first, you know, like not just on your code base, but also on your company. I design, even on the code bases, I design the code base not so it's useful, it's easy for me, so it has to be easy for the agent. I optimize for different things, not always the things that I prefer, but the things I know work the best and have the least friction for those models because I just want to move faster and ultimately they have to deal with the code, not me.

6. 1:36:55

   I deal with the overall structure and architecture, and I can still do that in the way that I like. Everything has to be re-thought. You know, pull requests. I see them more as prompt requests now. Like, I don't, somebody opens a pull request, I don't, a lot of do is say thanks, and I think about the feature. And then with my agent, we start off with the PR, and then I'll design the feature as I see fit.

7. 1:37:19

   The agent rarely reuses, like maybe I reuse some code, but it's more like it gives the agent a good understanding of what the goal is and sometimes it's very useful because it's tricky bugs right but I basically rewrite every pull request and weave it in also a lot of people let's just say the overall code quality of PR has run down a lot because people vibe code and building a successful feature still needs a lot of understanding of your overall design and if you cannot do that you will have a harder time steering your agent and the output will be bad.

8. 1:37:55

   Yeah, and if you don't have the feedback route to close it, et cetera. Yeah, so I found it highly effective. Like, you know, at PS3DFKit, sometimes a pull request was like a week in the work and then you comment on it and then somebody has to context switch and you wait for CI for 40 minutes. No, I have the discussion. I see, okay, how would this affect something? Like, I let the model review. They will already bring something up.

9. 1:38:16

   I have some ideas as well. We're going to reshape it into a form that fits my vision. and then we weave in the code. It's literally, there's so many new words I use for like writing code now with those models, which is so funny, like weaving in code into an existing structure. And sometimes you have to like change the structure so it would fit. Now, imagine that you would hire one or two people