Bit of a corner turn
I kind of feel we (and I) have turned a bit of a corner at work, with a few bits of tooling changes over the past few months.
Claude is basically my search engine now. It can happily go out and look at docs for things. Sure I could go look up the depths of the React Navigation docs, but I could also ask Claude and just... get the exact snippet I need. I still use Google for a load of stuff, but not for anything engineering related.
Most of the stuff I'm looking at is past Claude's cut off date too - this is tool use for web search.
Linear we moved to about 4 months ago. It's an absolute revelation. Attention to detail, quick to spin up projects (which match with how we work SO well), the Slack integration is just so... clean
@linear make this thread a ticket in the project please
and I now have a ticket with a summary of the discussion, any images and videos, and it posts back in the thread when we update/close the ticket. Makes bug bash triage trivial. It's about the best LLM integration into a product I've used anywhere.
And people like using it. I'm sure I could provide a bunch of feedback of small things to them, but they are small things.
Oh and Amp write a nice one-use script to move tickets from YouTrack to Linear using their APIs. Not a lot of interaction from me.
Amp and Claude Code are our primary agents, with most of the engineering team - and some PM's and others - using them daily. Not just for code (tho Amp is exceptionally good at that), but I've had it writing policy documents, or doing gap analysis between documents and what we have.
Hell, I got it to scape a friends old Wordpress blog, make markdown files for each post, get the images, then put them into a very specific json format for Pineary so we can make books. Doing this by hand (writing a scraper) would be days of work. It took me under an hour, wall time.
I was less concerned with the how and more concerned with the outcome.
It's not just AI tools, I feel we've moved from "well, this kinda works but it's not great" to "these tools accelerate me massively". Some of the team have been investing time in making the developer experience better too - local debugging (in typescript), moving to yarn4 / esbuild and other things which don't look substantial on the surface but make a massive day to day difference to happiness.
Corner. Turned.
