Uber reused cloud workspaces to give agents ready-to-build repos

Transcript

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

1. 16:14

   Yeah. So I think the backstory for DevPod is because we already talked about the growth of microservices. Initially, we had micro reposts where every service was its own repository. And we didn't have a standard build system at that point. Each service had their own. And we had at least two, three build systems, two, three testing systems. And it was very hard for even for a central team when we wanted to do library upgrades and go across all the services and do upgrades.

2. 16:41

   So around 2017, 18, we then changed the strategy to getting to monorepos even though they are microservices but all of the services were deployed from the monorepos we had one monorepo per language so we had a monorepo for go one for java one for mobile ios one for android and so on then once the scale of that repository was pretty big enough then like it was pretty hard to run the build and like getting all of those systems set up on your local laptop also then you have to like go through all kinds of setup issues so we took on this thing of like devpod which is like cloud developer boxes and you can have any number of them we had one devpod per monorepo so if i'm working primarily in java monorepo i create the java version of the flavor of the devpod and it has all the build system cached i can have faster builds it's working on cloud machines as a beefier than even

3. 17:39

   the laptops so then you could have like you could have really good slas on your build time on your test time and we don't have to worry about the setup issues because we can update we can install the right tools in place and now the interesting part is as we got to the ai era like even the agents need the similar workspaces and cloud boxes and we are able to kind of latch on to that and we also created like now a mega dev pod with all of the repositories because then i can have my agents create prs across the repositories it has all the tools it has to work in any repository to look at context across any repository this also helped us to create the agents md cloud md at the top report at the top folder because we have standardized build standardized testing once we set up the top level files most teams will get like really good value out of the bat they don't

4. 18:31

   have to like really go into per module setup and like on the dev pod all of the ai tools are installed by default so you can get a new dev pod you don't have to go through even installing like cloud code codex open go they're all there in the dev pod so this made it really easy even for non-engineers in the company to create a dev pod and start playing with cloud code start playing with codex out of the bat yeah so i i guess like having cloud development environments just like really early helped a lot yeah like i think uh all of those years of platformization bets also helped a lot uh as we expanded on our agentic journey because you could use all the things that we built