I've been experimenting with AI coding tools daily for the past year with a small engineering team (all senior 15+, FAANG backgrounds). Wrote down everything we learned, the parts that worked and the parts that didn't.
Some things that surprised us:
- AI is slower than writing code yourself on any single task. The win is not speed, it's parallelism. We made our dev environments duplicable and now work on multiple PRs simultaneously.
- AI is dramatically better on clean code than on technical debt. It's like a mirror that shows you how much chaos you've been tolerating.
- Out of the box tools give mediocre results. We invested heavily in configuration (20 AGENTS.md files, 6,553 lines total) and in augmenting the agent with skills: typechecking, test runners, read-only access to tickets, logs, Sentry. The agent self-debugs and fetches its own context now.
- Never trust the output. We built a pr-reviewer agent whose only job is to criticize code changes against the original specs. Strongly typed languages help enormously here, the compiler is your cheapest AI reviewer.
- Mental context-switching is the new must-have skill for engineers. You orchestrate, the AI executes (for now).
Would love to hear what's working for other teams, I'm sure our approach is not the only one.
Some things that surprised us:
- AI is slower than writing code yourself on any single task. The win is not speed, it's parallelism. We made our dev environments duplicable and now work on multiple PRs simultaneously.
- AI is dramatically better on clean code than on technical debt. It's like a mirror that shows you how much chaos you've been tolerating.
- Out of the box tools give mediocre results. We invested heavily in configuration (20 AGENTS.md files, 6,553 lines total) and in augmenting the agent with skills: typechecking, test runners, read-only access to tickets, logs, Sentry. The agent self-debugs and fetches its own context now.
- Never trust the output. We built a pr-reviewer agent whose only job is to criticize code changes against the original specs. Strongly typed languages help enormously here, the compiler is your cheapest AI reviewer.
- Mental context-switching is the new must-have skill for engineers. You orchestrate, the AI executes (for now).
Would love to hear what's working for other teams, I'm sure our approach is not the only one.