Test workloads are build workloads; test bottlenecks are build bottlenecks. It's time for a new kind of scheduler, that can run all our builds and tests as an integrated workload rather than dislocated siloes. Then we'll wonder how we ever tolerated CI this slow and wasteful.

An OpenAI agent swarm operating under poorly airgapped research conditions accessed my CBA Mastercard and bought 4 schooners of Newtowner between 5:52pm and 7:15pm last night

I'm looking for someone brilliant to come run internal developer velocity (DevEx) at @buildkite with me. Come help us build faster developer loops and ship software for the frontier labs and more. If you love CI/CD and agentic software development and have a track record of high-agency dev tooling at scale organizations, look me up for a chat. job-boards.greenhouse.io/bui…

Accidentally said CI/CD instead of software factory and they kicked me out of SF

There's a lot of talk about software factories right now. Frankly, most of it is bullshit. Beware “I do AI better than you" snake oil and think more from first principles. Strip most of them back, and you find a series of automations, and one of them happens to be a coding agent. (Which is also what CI/CD was. You stopped clicking around testing by hand, and a machine did it.) There’s a lot right with making your idea → ship loop continually faster and smarter, but I’m not sure that’s really a new idea. Nobody starts with a factory. A chocolate factory starts as one person and some beans in a kitchen, hand-making chocolate. Then they get a mixer. A bigger fridge. A conveyor belt. Then a packaging machine. Each addition builds scale, consistency and efficiency. A small business becomes a medium business, which becomes a factory. What changes along the way? Where the person stands. What the person does and the technology they can access. First, they do every step. They buy a machine or two. Then they do some steps and watch the machines. Then they operate and connect the machines. Then they redesign the factory itself. Software is the same loop. Ideas are dreamed up, feedback and operational bugs come in, someone turns them into a list of work items, someone builds it, someone reviews it, someone builds it, someone deploys it, it ships, something breaks, someone notices, someone files the bug. Rinse. Repeat. You've run that for years with a person at every station. To improve the factory you already have, upgrade one station today. Add automations and AI agents to code or review. Observe, learn. Then do the next one. Thoughtful, ambitious, patient scale. Are there roles for humans in that factory? Abso-bloody-lutely. Initiating ideas, observing the operation, reviewing at discrete checkpoints or severities, co-designing both the flowed work and the factory itself, owning exceptions and resolving conflicts, adding context. (Just look at one of our latest Loom action plans demo👇🏻 for an example of human-AI collaboration) I believe this human judgement and intuition only get more important as factory throughput scales. In short - don’t believe in the mythical agent month. You already have a software factory. AI just allows you to make more steps repeatable, more flexible - and that lets you move where you stand.

Test selection is going to be huge for compute reduction

🥳 Excited to start revealing what we've been working on in the last few months. First, we decided to reinvent Kubernetes for agentic workloads with statefulness and fast resumption. Secondly, we are building an agentic orchestrator that will be Google's open agentic orchestrator and runtime. github.com/google/ax

Mostly agree on these. My only reservation is on unit tests vs more complex integration tests and how that works as compute becomes the shortage.

new post: the senior engineer death spiral sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio… a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.

I think I speak for the internet when I say: fucking finally

Agreed, this is my expectation too. Architecture, trade offs and assumptions.

A very interesting second-order affect of our PR approval agent is that the feedback from the agent given before approvals has caused reverts to dramatically drop. I suspected that our code quality has improved a lot from my own use of it.

I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea. I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics). The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency. In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them. They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it. I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen. I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same. I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that. Number one tip: act with agency.

Hey @pangram I'm not sure if it's a humblebrag, but requiring a sales call for org subscriptions and then not having availability till November isn't great. Any other ways to send you folks money?

The benchmark results are telling us what we sort of already knew: patching vulnerabilities without breaking something else can be trickier than identifying and exploiting them. That's why it's so much better to find any vulnerabilities as early as possible in the software development cycle. What's interesting to me in the age of LLMs, however, is how much easier it is for LLMs to automatically discover and exploit vulnerabilities than patch them correctly. Vulnerability exploitation can be evaluated as a closed-loop problem, but most software doesn't have pervasive enough tests or specification to make patching the vulnerability a closed-loop problem. LLMs can only guess at open-loop problems based on their training.

Wow TIL

Beware people obsessed with outcomes instead of building outcome machines. Its worse than ever with AI, but these people existed before. Short term results above all else, etc. Don't fall into the trap. Invest in building strong fundamentals, invisible supports, and outcomes flow like water. An outcome machine.

Switching between threads in Amp is now a lot faster on Safari & our macOS/iOS apps Using @buildkite preflights (buildkite.com/docs/platform/…) on a macOS runner against the orb's tunneled dev server, opening Safari and collecting a web perf profile. Found lots of CSS/layout speedups.