A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: A Philosophy on AI in Dev

Summary

This is a memo I published internally to my team at Monarch. I’m sharing it more publicly in case it helps other software engineering teams that are managing the crazy times we’re experiencing. There’s no question: AI is changing how we work as Software Engineers. There’s a lot of hype, excitement, anxiety, and uncertainty around these changes. As an Engineering org, we’ve had a strong set of Engineering Values (How We Work Together) that have served us really well as we’ve grown. I wanted to drop a few thoughts on our philosophy on AI in Engineering, grounded in these values. For more details, you can see our AI in Engineering@Monarch [internal, redacted link] doc. Here is my ask of our team as we explore and implement AI in Engineering: Understand and explore the bleeding edge, but adopt a dampened one We definitely believe in and want to leverage AI in our work to increase productivity and quality. That said, if we try to always be on the bleeding edge, we will suffer from: Thrash. Since the bleeding edge is constantly changing (new tools come out, existing tools leapfrog each other, etc). Setting up, learning, and utilizing new tools and workflows takes time. We don’t want that to take away from our momentum and focus on shipping. Security exposure. There is a gold rush in AI. Companies are cutting corners to ship (or adopt) new tools. As evidence: every couple of days there is a new, high-profile AI-related vulnerability. We’ve built our product around trust, security and privacy. We cannot compromise here. So as an org, we may feel one step behind the bleeding edge, only adopting things once they are a bit more mature and battle-tested (”a step behind the blood”). That said, to know we are (only) a step behind, we must still understand the frontier. To do this, we will: dedicate time and resources to exploration (collectively, as an org) empower team-members to explore in certain, safe circumstances (eg prototypes, hackathons, or other individual initiatives)....