Companies report AI helping with tech debt and process automation, not just speed
2 Sep 21 5:50 PM · 2d ago · 1 post · 6 comments · 2 sources · development 2 of 2
A commenter noted that their company's AI use is focused on burning down known technical debt and automating QA processes, allowing QA teams to shift from blockers to proactive reviews and deeper issue discovery.
“A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes.”
TrueDualityLinear Software development tool companyTuomas Linear CTOjulian_digital Linear engineer
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because the tooling is struggling to catch up and adapt. there's still no vetted all-in-one solution that does code review, charts quality metrics, ingests incidents, and writes tests. there could be but each solution would necessarily need to be so bespoke to a codebase that you might as well hire some AI-pilled QAs and come up with it yourself…
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A good chunk of what my company has been doing with AI falls into either burning down our known tech-debt and "easy wins" that no one ever had the bandwidth to approach... And improving / automating our processes. The former is having a direct and meaningful impact on the quality and availability of our services.Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent…
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It's the difference between the value of "code" vs "software". Lots of people use those phrases interchangeably but its becoming painfully apparent that doesn't work anymore. Software requires more effort to actually make something IRL. Code can just be generated and sit in a repo, doing nothing, interacting with nothing.Github has reported a 14x…
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It really depends on the industry.The blind community is benefiting enormously from coding agents. Game accessibility mods for everything under the sun (the big names in the last month or two are Civ V and Witcher, although there's plenty more), accessible 3rd party clients for annoying sites, people's favorite speech synthesizers ported to…
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Personally I’m leveling up on using AI to develop a project. My speed at knocking out PRs has increased a lot, but much of that is massaging the process of using AI, including managing CI bottlenecks and costs. I’ve never had to deal with 15+ PRs being developed in parallel before. It’s interesting work, but there’s a lot of doing stuff to get to…
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Last year people were asking "if AI is so great then where are the new apps?". Then data for 2026 came out and now the IOS app store has a 84% percent year-over-year increase in new app submissions.For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I've seen. There's probably more -…
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Probably for the same reason that SV companies hiring thousands of developers struggled to improve their product much past the original product, that was built by a handful of people.Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get…
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> Why have we not seen an improvements in products? [..] Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?The simplest explanation is that they don't give a flying flamingo about what you or I consider "improvements to products".This report is an example.There are several changes that modify CI behaviour, where the article gives no…
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I’d love to see data. For my part the products I use seem to be moving faster, with more small fixes, accessibility better designed in, localization better (even if imperfect) and more rapid releases.I’m not sure Google, Apple, and Microsoft are the best barometers of AI impact on software engineering. They write software, but at such scale and…
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Agreed, but give it time. The tipping point of good models only just arrived with Fable 5, GLM 5.3, Grok 4.6, Muse Spark 1.3, and the like. Those are the only models that do a better job than me, and I'm happy to hang up my IDE—and that was barely a month ago.I've been fixing everything that has been sitting there—not blocking us, but slowing us…
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PS5 emulation has gone from barely working to running Dark Souls at 10+ FPS with virtually no graphical glitches… in 6 weeks. If you’re not familiar with normal emulator development time, this is… quite extraordinary. There have been insane progress on decompilations and many other things in the emulator space.Everyone’s trying to figure out how…
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>Why have we not seen an improvements in products?This was never the goal, because it would influence the standards and expectations of the end user. Any gamer remembers when Baldur's Gate 3 came out everyone said somewhere between "this is the new standard in AAA games" or "this is an amazing value for money". The response from the rest of the…
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There won't be any improvement in products. Most of software development is kayfabe performed for clueless executives. Meaningless and worse than useless software being developed as something new, because new gets promotion, bonus. Everyone is always developing something new and sometimes 3 - 6 new solutions by different orgs at the same time for…
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I think to solve this problem properly, we have to stop treating "build" and "test" as separate buckets of work, to be designed and scaled separately. It's all CI. As soon as you try seriously scaling out tests, you will run into build bottlenecks. To truly scale CI you need a scheduler that understands your build, test environment, and all the…
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go and look at how the good people and claude over at rsync are fixing all their bad security bugs currently: https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/42f7c32ce51d8e0... Also: any Linux-distro-bugtracker...So: while running in circles might be a bit of an exaggeration, it seems (which maps to my experience) these things are much less AGI than…
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I suspect a substantial part of this is an avalanche of useless testing.If you even review PRs still: when was the last time you didn't just skip over tests? And if you ever looked at tests in an LLM-heavy PR, how many of those tests tested something useful, and not just built-ins and trivial behaviours?There's at least some awareness in the…
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>Because the third-party runners sit outside GitHub’s network, they rely on a direct IP link to reach GitHub. The provider traced the hangs to intermittent degradation on that link.This is interesting. If I read that correctly this means the CI host had a direct peering connection with Github or Azure network.Why were they not able solve the…
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With the widespread increase in speed/commit cadence/content added to repos, I wonder if there's an angle here for companies with a lot of CI/CD needs to simply start self-hosting their CI/CD machines on premises.In my experience, self hosting your CI/CD runners had the biggest impact in cost savings throughout, while also allowing for more…
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Moose has entered the room.I built a debian based OS focused on self-hosting: github com/onmoose/os It's not really Linux size but I couldn't have built this if it wasn't for coding agents. Still a ton of work needed on UX but the main functionality works so well.Linux also has decades of work on it, we can't really expect new products to equal…
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My biggest takeaway (as a one man band 20 leagues below this spending time optimizing Gitlab free plan and self hosted runners): they did not worry about any of this until 100M ARR and more 1B valuation[0].[0]
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incentives are not aligned to improving products.the important thing to microsoft is still finding new ways to make money, not to make your clicks faster. they might even be using their new velocity to make clicks slower with an ad in between.there's alao much less incentive to build things to share. people can just make their own widget app and…
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Another approach is to redesign CI pipelines. Most checks should be done within the agent loop for quicker feedback (using hooks, skills). Linting, unit tests etc.CI should handle only stuff which cannot be run locally due to resource or setup reasons.Also CI should only receive pre-validated change candidates with passed checks inside the agent…
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Self-hosted is the way. Small potatoes in comparison, but I also made the change this year as my CI usage went from <3k mins/$0/mo -> $100+/mo.Migrated actions to a spare M2 MacBook Air at home, and when offline, uses hosted Actions as a backup. Bonus: has simulators/emulators for ease of running Maestro tests for mobile QA.
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I also reworked ours to keep up:- self hosted github runners to skip the setup- improved the test runners massively. Everything in parallel C threads. Using prek, not pre-commit for the linters.- replace slow stupid unit-tests with formal verification, to test all cases, not just a few. 2m for esbmcKeep it under 5 min for fast feedback.
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