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by samtp 316 days ago
I don't care about your workflow, that can be figured out from the 10,000 blog posts all describing the same thing. My issue is with people claiming this huge boost in productivity only to find out that they are working on code bases that have no real consequence if something fails, breaks, or doesn't work as intended.

Since my day job is creating systems that need to be operational and predictable for paying clients - examples of front end mockups, demos, apps with no users, etc don't really matter that much at the end of the day. It's like the difference between being a great speaker in a group of 3 friends vs standing up in front of a 30 person audience with your job on the line.

If you have some examples, I'd love to hear about them because I am genuinely curious.

2 comments

Sure, I'm working on a database proxy in rust at the moment, if you hop on GitHub, same username. It's not pure AI in the PRs but I know approximately no Rust, so AI support has been absolutely critical. I added support for parsing binary timestamps from PG's wire format, as an example.

I spent probably a day building prompts and tests and getting an example of failing behavior in Python, and then I wrote pseudocode and had it implement and write comprehensive unit tests in rust. About three passes and manual review of every line. I also have an MCP that calls out to O3 as a second opinion code review and passes it back in

Very fun stuff

I use agentic flows writing code that deals with millions of pieces of financial data every day.

I rolled out a PR that was a one shot change to our fundamental storage layer on our hot path yesterday. This was part of a large codebase and that file has existed for four years. It hadn’t been touched in 2. I literally didn’t touch a text editor on that change.

I have first hand experience watching devs do this with payment processing code that handles over a billion dollars on a given day.

Thanks, it's quite helpful to hear examples like that.

When you say you didn't touch a text editor, do you mean you didn't review the code change or did you just look at the diff in the terminal/git?

I reviewed that PR in the GitHub web gui and in our CI/CD gui. It was one of several PRs that I was reviewing at the time, some by agents, some by people and some by a mix.

Because I was the instigator of that change a second code owner was required to approve the PR as well. That PR didn't require any changes, which is uncommon but not particularly rare.

It is _common_ for me to only give feedback to the agents via the GitHub gui the same way I do humans. Occasionally I have to pull the PR down locally and use the full powers of my dev environment to review but I don't think that is any more common than with people. If anything its less common because of the tasks the agents get typically they either do well or I kill the PR without much review.