Transforming Code Review with AI: A Journey at Graphite" - Mel Lutzky, CEO
As code generation gets better, the way engineers interact with AI agents will fundamentally change, requiring new tools and workflows - and I'm Mel Lutzky, CEO of Graphite, a code review platform for the age of AI.
- 1. Graphite is a code review platform focused on AI.
- 2. The company has experienced rapid growth, increasing 20x in the past year.
- 3. Mel Lutzky, co-founder and CEO, described how they started Graphite after observing a gap between internal tooling at large tech companies and what was available to smaller companies.
- 4. Graphite's AI code review agent is called Diamond, powered by their partnership with Enthropic.
- 5. The founding team members had an "allergic reaction" to existing code review processes when they joined the company due to their past experiences at large tech firms like Google and Meta.
- 6. They noticed a need for efficient tooling for teams working on large monorepos across time zones.
- 7. Graphite aims to bring best-in-class workflows from big tech companies to smaller organizations.
- 8. The company believes that owning code review as the starting point is more important than focusing on in-loop code generation.
- 9. Graphite started with a tool for creating stacked pull requests, which breaks up large changes into small, dependent, and chained PRs.
- 10. Stacked pull requests save time by allowing engineers to avoid lengthy reviews and focus on other tasks.
- 11. They have observed significant improvements in development speed at top customers using Graphite.
- 12. As code generation tools become more advanced, there is a growing need for collaboration, testing, deployment, and measuring impact in the outer loop process.
- 13. The best engineers will be those who can think beyond just implementation to consider what should be built, how users will interact with it, and how to differentiate their work.
- 14. Software engineering is evolving to focus more on reviewing, designing, and product managing rather than solely writing code.
- 15. AI code generation has caused a seismic shift in software engineering, making the need for better code review tools even more critical.
- 16. Building trust with enterprise customers is essential when providing access to their GitHub repositories.
- 17. Graphite focuses on adding value progressively over time, shipping features consistently, and adhering to best practices for security.
- 18. The company started by working with smaller companies and gradually gained the trust of larger technology firms.
- 19. Graphite serves some of the largest technology companies today, providing them with AI-assisted code review tools.
- 20. Mel emphasized the importance of deeply understanding and genuinely caring about the user you're building for.
- 21. The Graphite team uses their own product every day, and they actively seek feedback from users and friends at various companies.
- 22. As AI code generation tools become more MVP-like, the focus shifts to the outer loop process of collaboration, testing, deploying, and measuring impact.
- 23. Modern software engineering will involve more design, product management, and reviewing than just writing and implementing code.
- 24. Building trust with enterprise customers is crucial when offering AI-assisted code review tools, which requires time, value delivery, and a strong focus on security.
Source: EO via YouTube
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