Minion handles about 15% of Uber’s production PRs

Transcript

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

1. 50:35

   Yeah, absolutely. I think that's why it really becomes important to think about the right plan upfront. And this will also make it easy for both the engineers or agents to take that plan and decompose and execute on that. Like once we have the plan, then the next thing is how do you convert that into decompose that and execute. Now we're kind of going into what we call minion internally. So this is our background coding agent.

2. 51:02

   so around 15 percent of all of the production PRs go through go through minion right now essentially you know this whole bunch of PRs that some PRs engineers want to do interactively but we also want to make it really easy once you have for the task that I have really good spec or I want to do minimal steering I can hand off that to a minion and we had again we had we did multiple iterations is the latest iteration we call it many and v2 but like you can use it from web you can use it from slack you can do a plan mode and then let it execute behind the scenes or you give one you can give the prompt once and let it execute behind the scenes if it's like a simple simple prompt and it has access to this is using the mega dev pod so then it has access to all of the repositories all of the code base that we have it can work across repositories

3. 51:57

   and generate one PR or multiple PRs across repositories based on the plan and spec that you have. When we initially started, mostly maintenance kind of tasks used to be offloaded to Minion. As we progress on this journey, as we are adding more and more tools into the Minion environment where Minion can self-validate its work in web or mobile or backend APIs, our goal is we can we can increase the kind of tasks people can do with minion over time increase the percentage of tasks over time i think we can also like see like how it's how it it's integrated in slack you can just mention do you mention minion at minion or what do you say you can do at minion and then it will show you the status and you can also like you don't need need to go to the web you can steer it on slack itself maybe you have like a slack thread with the

4. 52:56

   with the em with the pm you can iterate on the design if it's a simple thing you are just iterating and get alignment there and then say hey adminion follow this thread and can you can you create a pr and then it will take the slack thread context and then create a pr for you so it's been really useful even in our support channels i would see like someone reports a bug the on-call ask Minion hey like can you see what is the issue and then Minion will come back with oh this is the root cause oh this looks simple enough let's just fix it right there and then we would like fix it like there's no then loop of like adding it to backlog doing in the next next thing like you're able to fix it right there so we see like more and more cases of that as Minion gets powerful as well so I think we kind of

5. 53:40

   went through like the build step we also before talked about DevPot. It's improved since hasn't it? yeah so like this is showing all of my devpods since I'm working on context graph legacy how you see that but yeah as you if you if you want to create a new devpod you'll see like which flavor you want for for minion there is a devpod flavor that has all of the repositories but and optimized for minion usage but for interactive like it will create a devpod and within a matter of seconds you will have that running.

6. 54:17

   That's impressive. The second I'm sure you do some clever stuff like having things warm or pre-built so you can copy those kind of things. Yeah, it's like it's running on all of this. Because this is developer stuff, we have a separate multiple clouds that we are using for this. And it's like Kubernetes cluster and everything is warmed up. So then when you ask it, we are able to just clone from the pre-built image and it has build caches everything repositories everything already cloned like it's ready for you to build uh so i'm since we use basil across all of our repositories for build systems so i'm i was able to go into a repository like run basil for that and then just like we went we went through this in the order of this like you know seconds where any engineer like if they if i want

7. 55:07

   to make a code change here, like within order of seconds, I create DevPod. It's one single way to build any module. And then anyone knows this command. And now agents also knows the same way, right? In the CloudMD, AgentsMD, they know how to build, test any module in any repository. And they're able to use the exact same commands. Yeah. So I think that covers kind of like, you know, what the kind of stuff that you have to do in code generation.

8. 55:30

   So you can do interactive hardness, you can do like through Minion. The next thing is, okay, like you have the PR.