Cate Huston · engineering leadership
The benefit of conference season is talking to a lot of people (the downside: needing antibiotics), and of course many of those conversations came to AI, explicitly or not. But underneath the obvious shift there’s an industry one, which started with the end of ZIRP and AI exacerbated. An industry that used to be quite…

I keep hearing complaints about code review. About volume, about quality, about trying to take responsibility for code produced by colleagues who have abdicated their responsibility for thinking and are uncritically hitting enter. But how much of that is just grumpiness? Frustration? “AI slop” is the new “I didn’t like it.” Code review was always…

When we replatformed Twill, we built a software factory: agents write most of the code, a merge queue lands it, CI decides what gets through. Which means there’s a lot of activity, and every release I cut (several a week) includes a list of changes. But I need to know if the factory is working.…

Engineers, we use a lot of words to talk about architecture, but at a fundamental level, I think architecture is about making good decisions easier, on a timeframe you can reason about. → Small startups can’t reason about a long timeframe, so architecture has limited ROI.→ Banks have requirements around audit trails and – for…
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