When I look back at my career, the most fun and fulfilling times I have had has been tied to impactful projects with a team that is clicking. This has often happened at a startup, but it has also happened in some magical moments where the team is able to move fast and with agency within a larger company.
How often have you heard, or thought, the following?:
Remember when we were small? We moved so fast back then.
What if you could stay small and nimble, but get so much more done?
One core philosophy that DHH has often discussed as a key part of The Rails Way, is how it scales from a single developer. From Hello World to IPO. The way to do that is to be able to do more with less, and keep as much of the system in your head as possible. Allow room for the important pieces, and keep complexity from taking up valuable space.
When we come up with new infrastructure that compresses the complexity, we see amazing scale such as what the WhatsApp team was able to build with a small team.
I believe AI native tools can help here in a slightly different way. For example, you can somewhat outsource some of the complexity to the system. The brain budget can be augmented, and some of it can be swapped in, in real time.
This is an area of AI that I am particularly excited about, and I am seeing it occur in practice every day with customers at Augment.
When talking to one customer that is startup sized, they said:
We are growing like a weed, and I was nervous that we would have to grow the team… which scared me. I love our tight-knit crew and how we have trust and minimal coordination issues. But since using Augment and other AI tools we are finding that our work isn’t scaling linearly… we are so productive that we don’t have to grow to meet feature demand. I hope this lasts as long as possible!
This resonates a lot! I have seen the coordination headwinds first hand, and anything that you can do to minimize them will result in HUGE productivity gains… and will also give you more joyful moments.
How are AI tools helping?
I think that the following properties are compounding:
More than “faster typing”
It’s easy to think about features such as code completions as a way to speed up typing. Speeding up typing is just the start. The next step is taking care of raw toil and tedium, but where savings really kick in are when the suggestion brings you something that you maybe didn’t necessarily know what to write. I love it when this happens, especially when it teaches me something new about the codebase or another way to do something.
No more “Reading the docs”
The LLMs have read the docs for you, and much beyond. They have read your code, and that of all of your dependencies. They may have consumed knowledge from other sources (Linear tickets? Slack channels? PRs with comments?).
Instead of hunting down documentation, you can use features such as Chat to ask questions that map to your exact task at hand. You can personalize responses (maybe you want a terse reply, or the opposite?). And having help that maps to your context means you aren’t translating between the examples that happen to be in the docs.
Saving time not just for myself, but for my team
I hate interrupting my coworkers when I am stuck. Now the first line of defense allows me to stay unblocked by working with Augment. This can save a ton of “clock time” when my coworkers are busy… or on the other side of the world!
This doesn’t mean I don’t want time with my colleagues, but it can be focused on working together on more novel and creative problems.
Confidence working across unfamiliar codebases
Maybe you aren’t as experience in Rust and have been nervous to touch that part of the codebase. You don’t have to worry as much about the idioms of the language, and you can use these tools to help you learn as you use autocomplete functionality and chat to act more declaratively.
This flexibility is being noticed, and “full stack” is morphing into the rise of the “product engineer”:
This also works when your team has to interact with another team at a larger company. You may not have to wait for the work to be done by them, and instead can dive in and collaborate to get something done!
From code completion to task completion
Code completions are still a favorite feature. I feel like I am dancing with my AI partner and quickly iterate and steer. But we are now seeing the ability to share your intent at a higher level, and have new UX that will quickly help you get a full task done. I’m very excited to share what Augment has been doing here.
Think you can keep your A-Team?
Now, I may be biased… but I think the best way to keep the A-Team together is to have a developer AI platform that has the deep codebase and external context awareness to act like you are working with the experience of your entire team vs. a knowledgable engineer that knows the basics. The difference is night and day, and I get very happy thinking about smaller teams with super powers. I hope you do too!
And maybe you will have the type of outsized impact that 13 employees did at Instagram, or 55 at WhatsApp, or 50 at Mojang (Minecraft), or if you are truly lucky… Donald Knuth with TeX?
(I was thinking about TeX and Professor Knuth again when Matt Holden recently shipped TexSandbox, a tool I wish I had in my Math courses at Uni!)