Artificial Intelligence1 min read

Bad ideas that aren't bad anymore

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

A software engineering team leader with 15 years of experience is reassessing standard leadership assumptions after observing the benefits of automated, AI-driven workflows. Approximately a month ago, the team replaced peer code reviews by pairing engineers with Claude to author pull requests, relying instead on direct author evaluation, automated continuous integration, and Greptile reviews. Additionally, shifting team members into isolated, parallel workstreams due to project demands and holidays has avoided the negative consequences historically associated with knowledge silos. A recent team retrospective confirmed that these experimental changes preserved productivity without harming ov…

Key points

  • Replacing traditional peer code reviews with automated tooling and AI collaboration remov…: Replacing traditional peer code reviews with automated tooling and AI collaboration removes delays while keeping the primary engineer in control.
  • Running parallel, separated workstreams can successfully meet project demands without aut…: Running parallel, separated workstreams can successfully meet project demands without automatically causing damaging knowledge silos.
  • Artificial intelligence workflows are proving that historical software engineering anti-p…: Artificial intelligence workflows are proving that historical software engineering anti-patterns can become effective modern operational practices.

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I’ve been working in software for about 15 years now, and over that time I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned from a lot of other people’s mistakes. This experience is a deep well that I can draw from when discussing possible solutions for both technical and non-technical problems. This is how I know what sorts of solutions sound good in theory but run into problems in practice, or what fringe idea is actually a perfect fit for the problem we’re trying to solve here. This knowledge & experience is a big part of what has made me effective as a leader.

Lately, though, a lot of the things my gut tells me are bad ideas are turning out to work really well. In our team’s retro this week that hit me pretty hard, and it was a real learning moment for me. It made me realize that a big chunk of the intuition I’ve been relying on might not be worth as much as I thought anymore, and that I need to question that experience more frequently.

So…

Artificial Intelligence