Reflections on AI and DX

Thanks to Defrino Maasy for making this photo available freely on unsplash 🎁

We have a standing working session on Friday mornings. We've been doing it for a few years now.

Over time the topics have ranged from a focus on specific technology (we did a bunch of frontend-focused ones in 2021), to tooling, to team dynamics and other topics.

For the forseeable future, our focus is shifting to AI - adoption on our team, and what it means for our careers.

We've had productive meetings. I wrote about how we used local dev containers to decentralize and speed up development. I tried to show off a claude skill I made to streamline local dev containers, and it worked more or less.

We had a great discussion this morning about how we could utilize agentic workflows to reduce the amount of human interaction involved in customer support. This one's tricky because our product is an infrastructure-level AWS layer, so we're gonna have to bring the context to AI (or the AI to the context).

One of my chief joys as a lead engineer is to make my team's daily lives easier. I've grown to cherish making the Developer Experience for the guys more seamless, chipping away at the manual tedium between a unit of work and it's results.

I'm not a prophet, but I feel there's a tension brewing here between a healthy focus on DX and agent-aware workflows. Because people and agents are different.

Well, are they all that different?

I think I need to ruminate on this more, but alas the work day is ending and the kids need to be woken up.