Engineering

For years, we’ve been told that software is eating the world. Big, cloud-hosted platforms — Salesforce, Notion, Slack, Jira, Airtable — working to solve every problem for every team, at any scale. And mostly, they delivered. SaaS transformed how businesses work.

A few months ago, I wrote about vibe coding and the challenge of shipping quickly-created prototypes. I ended that post suggesting we could “teach” coding agents about our platform primitives through instruction files and MCP servers. At my day job (League), we’ve been putting this idea into practice, and the results have been very encouraging.

AI-assisted coding tools and agents have unlocked an unprecedented level of functional prototyping. Not just for developers. Product managers, Designers, even the C-suite are building functional prototypes of their ideas in a matter of days, or even hours.

I’ve been using Copilot in VS Code to help build several different projects. I’ve also used Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT to help start and evolve projects. I find the tools to be very helpful and I feel more productive using them. I also find myself having more fun when using the tools.

With engineering focus on reducing incidents and improving operational reliability, I frequently come back to the realization that humans are fallible and we should be learning ways to nudge people toward success rather than failure.

“Developers should only need Github Issues and Pull Requests to do their job” — Why should anyone need more than that to track work?

Practice makes perfect — Anonymous Parent