Dax Raad

This has been the thing we've always been trying to do forever.

How do we get a junior engineer to ship

code safely without breaking stuff right how do we make patterns in the code base how do we make tests like it's all the old stuff that we've always wanted to do like i would love to be able to hire 100 junior engineers and have them be effective but you know there's like limits to that we were we never really figured that out and like some companies did to some degree some companies kind of didn't so it's kind of the same problem as always which is how do i make a less experienced person punch above their weight right and now you know it's using coding agents that's maybe like how do we let a designer ship stuff stuff like that

uh so in a lot of ways i think it's the same problem as always which is how do you make code bases that are easy to work in scalable flex to new requirements um i think a lot of like the old patterns from here coming back we've always been like a big domain driven design company um we did it in a very light way

We're now doing it in a much heavier way because we find that these like kind of boring enterprise-y patterns end up being pretty useful because you have a bunch of idiots on your team now.

The coding agents are a bunch of idiots and they are going to work 24-7 and they're going to like ship a lot of stuff.

So you need way more guardrails than you used to.

I think what's nice is some of these old patterns we hated because they were very verbose.

They produced reliable code that was like modular and safe, but they were very verbose and annoying to type out.

But you're not typing it out anymore.

So now you can kind of get the benefits of these patterns without the downsides.

So we're starting to like explore that more and kind of enjoy that.

Yeah.

And if you're a good programmer, you didn't have to do those patterns.

You can kind of like you didn't need the training wheels in a lot of ways.

But now, like, you know, agents don't have training wheels.

So you have to put them back on.

I have a tough time giving advice to people because I feel like I work in such a weird place.

My company, one, it's a startup, so it's innately automatically a little bit weird.

Two, we do open source, which is like, there's like five companies that are open source companies, really.