Familiar Faces in a New World

The Zoom window popped open to a familiar face: my former big tech colleague, Tal Salmona. We used to chat about meeting fatigue and the constant struggle to find focus time. But catching up with Tal now, who currently leads engineering and cofounder at Arato.ai, revealed that our old problems are relics of a different era.

We, engineers, are no longer writing code; we’re supervising an army of autonomous agents. The friction and limitations do not derive from how fast someone can type, but from how many threads they can weave at the same time. 

Whereas people used to focus on DevOps … to improve organizational efficiency … today, we aren’t just trying to make humans more effective; we need to make the AI agents they operate more effective too. We are essentially rebuilding the software factory from scratch.

Whereas people used to focus on DevOps … to improve organizational efficiency … today, we aren’t just trying to make humans more effective; we need to make the AI agents they operate more effective too. We are essentially rebuilding the software factory from scratch.

New Rules: When Traditions Morph

The original “Joel Test” had questions around daily builds, building in one step, and source control. These areas have blurred and morphed into the continuous integrating, building, and deploying pipeline juggernauts of today. 

Modern high-velocity assembly lines have transformed CI/CD from a passive deployment step into a floodgate that manages the massive volume of code generated by AI. In Joel’s era, Rule 2 asked whether you could make a build in one step, and Rule 3 asked if you made daily builds. Today, daily builds are a fundamental baseline. The new operational reality is managing blast radius and assembly line velocity when AI agents generate code at volumes human reviewers cannot maintain without help.

If the agent creates code at a much higher velocity, … we cannot review in the same way. … At a minimum, we need to filter what needs human eyes versus what can be reviewed solely by an agent … giving the human reviewer more information than they ever had before.

If the agent creates code at a much higher velocity, … we cannot review in the same way. … At a minimum, we need to filter what needs human eyes versus what can be reviewed solely by an agent … giving the human reviewer more information than they ever had before.

Because AI agents can generate pull requests, run them against temporary test environments, and validate fixes autonomously, the traditional barrier between engineering and product roles dissolves almost entirely. Product managers and non-engineers can now drive features end to end in sandboxed environments, leaving engineers to focus on architectural........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)