Haha, love it.
An inspirational story for sure!
A very interesting insight about AI coding. It gets at the theory building part of programming, which is much harder to do when just supervising an AI in my experience. On the other hand, I am so much faster that it's hard not to use AI for coding. Interested to see what they come up with!
But I actually found a use case where the agentic approach adds incredible value: internal tooling and visualization.
I was debugging some feature in the core, and had some code to jump a JSON diagnostic structure with a lot of info. Looking at this directly was getting to be a pain, so I wanted to write a UI for it.
Claude handled this task almost perfectly for <$5. I wrote up a description of the JSON schema, and a description of how that should map to a view, added some styling directions, and let er rip. In one afternoon, I go the UI built for me when I was doing dishes.
So I built the tool and went back to debugging and made a ton of progress using it. It's ok if I don't have a full internalization of the visualization architecture. It's basically a complex software "jig" that the AI built for me. I can build new ones as necessary.
A very interesting revelation.
Its a pity because it shows that there’s just so much more money by not catering to tens like ours
1. Buildkite is probably the best commercial, off-the-shelf CI system right now, in terms of providing all the correct building blocks at the correct level of abstraction. 2. The impact of your CI system itself being good or bad is tiny in comparison to everything else in your end-to-end CI workflow. Far more important are your own CI scripts and what they run. A distant second is the observability tooling around your CI. 3. It's hard to justify the per-seat pricing of Buildkite, as a separate line item, when whatever CI offering your source control host bundles in will suffice.
I disagree here. A bad CI system makes it very, very easy to make the end to end workflow incredibly painful. Some small QOL features (buildkites input step was probably the reason it stuck for so long with us) are the difference between a tool being indistinguishable from others and being leaps and bounds ahead.
> it’s hard to justify the per seat pricing of buildkite
Buildkites pricing starts at 50% more than GitHub enterprise does. I couldn’t justify it as someone who loves buildkite and is in charge of making those decisions.
exidy•5mo ago
I do wonder how BK will continue in a world that's increasingly dominated by GitHub and and other integrated solutions, but I hope as long as there's a market for quality tools, BK will survive and thrive.
kawsper•5mo ago
It was the bill I was the happiest to pay.
We used Knapsack Pro to efficiently parallelise our Ruby test suite.
Today, I still use Buildkite, but now I build golden images (with packer) and deploy them with terraform.
sj26•4mo ago
https://buildkite.com/resources/blog/terraform-techniques-wi...
We still have this pipeline with terraform, but have moved from building packer images for ec2 to building containers for ecs.