This to me reads less as there being some objective level when a PR becomes "huge" and more about the tension between a system's ability to absorb change vs. our tools' ability to create change.
By way of analogy consider the relative impact on an ecosystem of one person fishing with a fishing line vs. a commercial fishing boat trawling the ocean. Of course, one person fishing is unlikely to have a huge impact on the ocean so it's generally permitted. Trawling (agentic coding) can be done in a way that's destructive to ecosystems but it can also be done sustainably!
So with the analogy in mind let's bring back the "sensible trawling" idea to agentic coding. What might it look like to solve the "huge PR bad" constraint in another way: by increasing our codebases' ability to absorb change, so what "a huge PR" is, becomes bigger?
Probably needs solves at many levels: assistance quickly comprehending the PR (AI driven walkthroughs, multiple media expected from the PR submitter not just text - eg. a screencast walkthrough of it), it requires rethinking how the code is read (better review tooling); it requires integrations with code-review automation tools (both you home-grown checklist and third-party tools) it requires rigorous testing (comprehensive automated e2e; test-driven; functional tests; etc); it requires putting the actual "in the loop" so post-release fast-follows can be expedited (eg. product signals and Sentry and metric anomalies are fed back in for quick follow up releases)
If you can be so much more responsive to the customer and market. Eg. you can unlaunch features just as easily as you launched them - and you can finally clean up all that tech debt. Better for the business better for the codebase and better for developer happiness.
Not all these strategies work for every situation - you can't do post-release in the loop if the shit needs to work first time! But the whole idea creates so much richness in applying human judgment and engineering solutions and it's all brand new because we never needed to deal with this much change before
Think of it as "releases in the loop".
If opportunities to rethink the stack to support MORE change excite you, congratulations! You're ready for the future that's coming. If you don't like this - get yourself into a job where you can say no a lot, or where shit needs to work first time, and you can be happy. Test-driven, strongly reviewed.. there's ways with agentic coding to also make super high quality stuff. But you can also shoot product from the hip more accurately and more often than ever before.
It won't be applied correctly everywhere - it's still heavily judgmental dependent and we're all fallible - but there'll be a much wider spectrum of options for how to build products. I think this is a really exciting future!
Comments
This to me reads less as there being some objective level when a PR becomes "huge" and more about the tension between a system's ability to absorb change vs. our tools' ability to create change.
By way of analogy consider the relative impact on an ecosystem of one person fishing with a fishing line vs. a commercial fishing boat trawling the ocean. Of course, one person fishing is unlikely to have a huge impact on the ocean so it's generally permitted. Trawling (agentic coding) can be done in a way that's destructive to ecosystems but it can also be done sustainably!
So with the analogy in mind let's bring back the "sensible trawling" idea to agentic coding. What might it look like to solve the "huge PR bad" constraint in another way: by increasing our codebases' ability to absorb change, so what "a huge PR" is, becomes bigger?
Probably needs solves at many levels: assistance quickly comprehending the PR (AI driven walkthroughs, multiple media expected from the PR submitter not just text - eg. a screencast walkthrough of it), it requires rethinking how the code is read (better review tooling); it requires integrations with code-review automation tools (both you home-grown checklist and third-party tools) it requires rigorous testing (comprehensive automated e2e; test-driven; functional tests; etc); it requires putting the actual "in the loop" so post-release fast-follows can be expedited (eg. product signals and Sentry and metric anomalies are fed back in for quick follow up releases)
If you can be so much more responsive to the customer and market. Eg. you can unlaunch features just as easily as you launched them - and you can finally clean up all that tech debt. Better for the business better for the codebase and better for developer happiness.
Not all these strategies work for every situation - you can't do post-release in the loop if the shit needs to work first time! But the whole idea creates so much richness in applying human judgment and engineering solutions and it's all brand new because we never needed to deal with this much change before
Think of it as "releases in the loop".
If opportunities to rethink the stack to support MORE change excite you, congratulations! You're ready for the future that's coming. If you don't like this - get yourself into a job where you can say no a lot, or where shit needs to work first time, and you can be happy. Test-driven, strongly reviewed.. there's ways with agentic coding to also make super high quality stuff. But you can also shoot product from the hip more accurately and more often than ever before.
It won't be applied correctly everywhere - it's still heavily judgmental dependent and we're all fallible - but there'll be a much wider spectrum of options for how to build products. I think this is a really exciting future!