Dion Almaer

Software, Development, Products

Software Development

Stitching with the new Jules API

The Jules team finished off another ship week with the release of an initial version of their API, allowing you to integrate with your friendly asynchronous squid engineer.

I have been interested in having a native app that let’s me interact with Jules, and get notifications pinged to me when activities are ready for the next step. This way I can nudge the system along before the next thing.

So, I found myself in front of some English Premier League games on a Sunday morning, laptop on my… well lap.

By the time the last ball was kicked in the Brentford vs. Man City game, I had a working application that was designed by Stitch, and coded up with Jules… a favorite pair of mine these days 🙂

Starting with the Spec

As per usual these days, I started by defining a simple spec that ​captures what I am looking to build: it’s design and implementation. Sometimes I work with an AI to go deep on the definition up front, and other times I stay shallower and flush out the spec as I add more features.

This is also where I capture useful context such as the documentation for the alpha Jules API, so it is always available to an agent.

Designed By Stitch

Next, I feed the spec, which contains the screens that I am looking to design, into Stitch. Given that Jules has a strong design aesthetic, I could take a screenshot of the home page, which includes all of the whimsy of the squid and their adventures, and pass it into Stitch as the design inspiration to go along with the spec.

That is all I needed to get what I wanted this time, in comparison to when I am in a new area exploring a bunch of design styles.

I tend to follow a layout pattern for screens when there isn’t a complex flow.

The first screen on the left is the screen I ended up choosing, and the others to the right are copies where I have asked for specific edits, or where I have asked for a series of variants. It’s a rare project when I don’t ask for variants as this is the fun of Stitch! It’s cheap to explore!

And here’s the project to explore yourself!

Coded by Jules

Finally, it’s time to build. I setup a repo that contains my spec as a README.md, and the screens that I want to build which have been downloaded from Stitch.

This time, I decided to code a SwiftUI based native iPhone app. Hmm, the Stitch screens are paired images as well as HTML/CSS code. Fortunately, LLMs are REALLY good at translating. They can listen in English and speak back in Spanish. And they can read HTML and come back with Swift. It’s impressive.

Now, I have the admit that the early alpha API doesn’t have allllll of the documentation available yet, so I first asked for an API client, and then had it run through and output sample payloads which I saved away to look through, and for the AI to have in it’s back pocket to flush out the full client with the given info.

Now I had designs, API samples, docs, and a spec. It was time to get Jules coding… and while waiting for some of the initial work, I noodled away and added issues to tag Jules into later.

Now, I admit that it’s a bit more frustrating working with an iPhone app compared to the Web… I wasn’t able to puppeteer, nor get preview links to test with in a wonderful happy cloud. Instead I was running locally and pulling things down (and back with changes).

But a short time later, I was enjoying a new shiny squid app on my phone. I love this new world of personal software where you can go from an idea to it running in your hand, in the exact way you want it.

Here are some of the screens in all their glory!

More adventures with my friend are just a tap away!

/fin

Cultivating a Durable Championship Caliber Team

Manchester City just became the first team in history to win the Premier League championship four years in a row, with the chance to win the FA Cup this coming weekend. They are a dynasty, with 6 premiership wins in the last 7 seasons and many other trophies including the coveted Champions League.

I enjoy looking at sports as an analogy to business, and watching Pep Guardiola manage his team to success whilst making constant changes definitely hits home with what I have seen at my companies over the years (and what I haven’t seen!).

Long Term Success

I have seen two extremes when it comes to building a great team.

  • Extreme 1: Hire the best people and let them do their thing
  • Extreme 2: Build the right systems and the rest will follow

I have come to learn that the best long term results come from multiplying the two in certain ways.

When I look at what Manchester City have done for this long term success, it stems from a large number of ingredients, many of which are flywheels to each other.

Recruitment

They are constantly bringing in amazing talent into an already high quality and substantial squad. They never rest on their laurels here, with the example of Doku coming in right after Jack Grealish to have strong backup and competition on the left flank. Always Be Recruiting.

The Money Machine

Recruiting great players requires funds. The financial fair play system in the premier league is a joke, but requires that you are getting revenue in every possible way (sell those t-shirts!) as well as selling players wisely. Man City has the highest wage bill in the league, which means it has the best chance to have the best squad. How can you recruit top talent?

Setting The Bar

The culture has to drive everyone to be the best they can be, as individuals helping the overall team. Senior players need to show new players what good looks like, and how they need to work to reach it. Manchester City players work their arses off on the field. They don’t sit there with ego and think they can do anything else, which happens with some clubs and players who think they are the bees knees. 

The right mix of senior and junior is critical, and the changing room is where a lot of things get worked out. The manager doesn’t do all of the work, a lot happens through the senior players!

How is the bar set on or across your team?

Style Of Play

Teams have a “style of play”, and clubs such as Man City and Liverpool do a fantastic job of driving this though out all levels. When you have your academy driving this style into the youngsters, they have the best chance to break through into the first team. We saw this when Liverpool won the league cup this year with many of their academy players starting due to a huge number of injuries. 

How are you defining and driving a style of development throughout the company?

Individual vs. Team Tactics

Without a style of play framework you still need room for tactical tweaks depending on the individuals in the team and their strengths, as well as the opposition that you are up against.

The style of play is so strong, that many admire the fact that even when Erling Haaland and Kevin De Bruyne were injured, Phil Foden and Julian Arvarez fit right in to continued success. They are very ers.different players, and Pep tweaked the system to make sure the overall team was setup with these players in those positions. This is where the art comes in. 

How are you balancing a team that can flex as personnel come and go, and making sure that individuals bring their strengths?

Time to Peak

A season is long, and just as the best trainers have their horses peak for the big races, you need to think about keeping the team healthy over the long term, and knowing when you need to peak. For example, when I was at Walmart, we knew that Black Friday and the holiday period wasn’t going to move for anyone. ~80% of all revenue comes in that period, and thus we need to be ready for that time. Elsewhere, you may have Conference Driven Development or other deadlines that you feel you need to peak for. Manchester City famously makes sure that they are close enough to strike in April, and finish through the posts really strong. What is your cadence and how do you stay a healthy team?

Aligned to the goals

How do you stay hungry? After the third premier league how does the team get up for putting in all of the work that they know is required to start again? You need to align the purpose as much as possible. Does your team know why you are all gathered to do this work and why it is important?

Where I have seen things gone wrong

I have learned through mistakes and observations where one of the extremes has been ignored to ill effect.

All people, no systems

At Walmart, one of my regrets was how I didn’t make sure that certain systems were in place. This resulted in far too much hero culture, and when the heroes moved on, there wasn’t resiliency in place to be able to handle things. We hired great people, but didn’t have a system for the long term.

All systems, not thinking people

I am now seeing many mistakes when it comes to layoffs that are far too much about systems and ignoring the fact that the humans involved aren’t all equal.

I recently spoke to an engineering director who had 35% of their team laid off, but with the “good news” that they have the HC back but only for hiring L4s in India. They didn’t have a say in who was leg go, and shockingly it included some of the most productive members of the team with deep knowledge locked in their heads.

Instead of giving full ownership to a team in India, they now have to deal w/ managing with a team across many time zones. Penny wise, pound foolish. I am so curious why leadership is giving “Strat Ops” teams spreadsheets to normalize wrt HC.

I know of other leaders who play with config files that allow them to change the wingspan of a manager to reports ratio. No nuance allowed.

I am excited to make sure that at Augment we grow at the right pace, and work to have the talent density that allows smaller teams do more, and cut out communication costs and hierarchy that massive teams often cause. One of the reasons I am so excited for what we are building at Augment is that I really believe it can help keep teams small by allowing the conscious creatures the ability to do what works best for them, with help from our 24/7 available computer systems.

Durable Success = The Best Set Of People * The Right Evolving Systems

Introducing Augment: a company dedicated to empowering developers with AI

I’m incredibly excited to share that Augment, the company I joined to help empower developers, has come out of stealth.

With a lot of FUD around AI taking all of the knowledge worker jobs, including those of developers, I believe it is important to get across the counter argument:

“Don’t fire Kevin for Devin just yet. Augment Kevin with super powers!”

Me

If you think about what software engineers actually do and what AI excels at, you should reach the same conclusion. It’s easy to anthropomorphize AI tools, especially when you’re chatting with them and considering their portrayal in science fiction. With that in mind, I believe in creating systems that resemble J.A.R.V.I.S more than HAL.

As we develop these systems, it’s essential to remember that humans and computers have unique strengths. The real magic happens when humans take charge, supported by ever-present, fully connected computer systems.

By doing so, we can not only improve life for developers individually, but also empower teams and organizations to accomplish much more with reduced toil and communication costs.

I’m passionate at doing my part to help here, and I want to share my journey to Augment with you.

Seeing the future of software development

I love programming. Whenever I write some code, it tends to be a good day. There is something about the creative process that ends with something tangible that is good for my brain. Any platforms, tools, or services that allow me to stay in that certain flow of development become favorites. There is an art to taking an idea, breaking it down, and making progress.

The longer I am on the path to running code that works – or getting effective help back onto the path when it isn’t working – the better I feel.

On the flip side, whenever I am doing something that feels like toil, or I feel really stuck, the worse I feel.

There have been a couple of times when I saw how AI technology could dramatically help:

  • I worked with a research team inside X at Google who built models (in the pre-LLM/transformer days) that could help the highly skilled SWEs keep up with the constantly evolving monorepo. This was often very boring work, ripe for a computer to help.
  • I worked on a project at Shopify that uses LLMs to bridge the complexity of GraphQL for developers wanting to integrate with merchant data. This quickly taught me lessons, such as:
    • It’s easy to show a cool (somewhat contrived) demo
    • It’s hard to build something great that works at scale in the real world
    • One LLM isn’t the answer for all use cases
    • It’s not just quantity… quality data matters
    • Having a system that can really do well wrt evaluations is vital as you iterate

Projects like these gave me the evidence to see how software engineering is going to radically change in the future, and pairing AI technology with developers will be the driver.

Meeting the Augment team

I was sold on the opportunity that this AI wave could allow us to help developers in new expansive ways. I started to explore, and this exploration lead me to chatting with a couple old friends, Luke Wroblewski and Sam Pullara who are building companies at Sutter Hill Ventures, a pretty unique VC firm.

Luke and Sam grinned as I spoke about my desire to build for developers with AI, and quickly introduced me to the founders and team behind Augment.

I met Guy Gur-Ari, the co-founder leading the research efforts at Augment. He had already assembled a team of AI researchers and engineers who had many years of expertise with ML and how it can be applied to code. This was important to me, as I had found that to build something truly great, you need the ability to make changes across the entire stack. You want to be able to change the engine along with the other parts of the car!

Igor Ostrovsky, the other co-founder and pioneer of Augment, also gave me a lot of faith that we had the broad technical expertise to pull this off at scale. His proven track record with distributed systems as Chief Architect of Pure Storage, developer focused work at Microsoft, and his deep dive into AI as an entrepreneur in residence with SHV was inspiring.

Then I discovered that Scott Dietzen had joined as CEO. I first met Scott at the birth of enterprise Java, where he was CTO at BEA WebLogic, my favorite app server of choice.

As I met the broader team, I had a strong feeling that this was a team with the focus, experience, and skill to take a shot at building the best AI platform and ecosystem for developers.

The team had gone deep in building foundational technology that is needed to solve the meaty problems that developers have, especially at scale. These include building a system that:

Has an expert understanding of large codebases

There are solutions out there that feel like you have access to a system aware of core technology. They have a solid understanding of programming languages, and popular frameworks.

When using Augment, we want you to feel like you are working with the joint intuition of your most seasoned engineers at the company, and those with deep expertise on the dependencies that you use.

Any suggestions need to reflect the APIs and coding patterns in your company’s code so your team can use it on your actual day-to-day work.

Produces running code

The custom AI models and infrastructure are tuned for code and coding use cases avoiding frustrating hallucinations and focuses on improving code quality… not just productivity.

Operates at the speed of thought

There were many search engines before Google, but I remember trying it for the first time, and seeing how the experience was a step change. The quality of the results were next level AND the speed to return them felt different.

Working with LLMs can be a lil… slow, which massively degrades the experience and can keep knocking you out of flow.

The team had built a fast inference — 3x faster than competitors — built on state-of-the-art techniques, including custom GPU kernels, and I felt the difference in the experience.

Supports multiple developers & teams

Software development is a team sport. There are so many areas where technology can help scale and improve the use of best practices across a team, help you learn a complex codebase, and get new engineers onboarded faster.

The scale of computers allow a system to attend to do much more, and they are available 24×7.

I have learned the power of small teams. We have seen with early customers that the shape of teams can change when you deliver the right capabilities. If we can enable smaller teams to do more, and for teams to do more in parallel, we result in better software and happier devs to boot!

Includes strong IP protections

Your company’s source code is precious. Augment was designed from the first line of code for tenant isolation, with an architecture built to protect your IP.

Try Augment

Joining Augment has already been a blast. Moving at startup speed with a great crew all focused on helping developers is a dream come true for me. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to go after this problem space with a small (but growing! Join us?) team.

We are heads down delivering on our promise, working closely with early access customers, who have been a key part of our product development thanks to their fantastic feedback (thank you!).

We are furiously working our way to a public product launch that we can’t wait to share.

Until then, if you are interested in kicking the tires early, please sign up for the waitlist!

The right thing to do, is the right thing to do.