Cate Huston · engineering leadership
Engineering an Interesting Life.
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Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software Factory
→: Escaping the No-Code Platform by Building a Software FactoryI’m not someone who gets called when things are going well. So when Michelle – the Twill CEO – called me in December, it was because she needed some help with engineering. In 18 months of being an advisor, this was the first time it was a phone call and not an email. There were…
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Judgement > Output
→: Judgement > OutputThe 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…
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Attempting to reverse engineer code review
→: Attempting to reverse engineer code reviewI 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…
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Is the software factory working?
→: Is the software factory working?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.…
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