Engineering stories, perspectives, and product updates from the team building Depot.
Perspectives


Iris Scholten
26.08.11
How I delegate the work, not my judgment
Agents can investigate, plan, and implement faster than I can, but reading a final diff is not the same as understanding why the system works the way it does. I own how the system behaves in production, so I want to keep building my intuition about it.


Kyle Galbraith
26.07.29
GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world
GitHub isn't just falling short on performance and reliability. The whole collaboration paradigm is the wrong shape for how we build software now.


Andrew "Watts" Watkins
26.07.13
Why your team processes suck
A team process without a principle underneath it is a real problem. Here's why the "why" is worth protecting as you scale.


Peter Hasko-Nagy
26.06.30
Staying in control of your codebase in the AI era
AI can produce code faster than you can review it, but you're still the one on call when it breaks. You need an AI-assisted workflow you trust: linter guardrails, reference tests the agent can copy, tight AGENTS.md files, and PRs small enough to review. The goal isn't to avoid AI, it's to stay in control of what it ships.


Héja Péter (Vau)
26.06.11
Paranoia is baseline now: Security in the AI era
Paranoid hardening has always been with us: aggressive kernel customizations for bug classes without a proven exploit, while Linux itself had a good-enough disclosure track record. Some of these hardenings became the default, some stayed controversial for a long time. AI-assisted vulnerability research made finding obscure vulnerabilities fast and cheap. So what does good enough even mean in this new era?


Andrew "Watts" Watkins
26.05.13
Context isolation in coding agent loops
The longer I worked on a problem with a coding agent, the dumber it felt. My context window was a junk drawer. Here's the multi-role loop I built so plans, builds, and reviews each get their own clean context.


Kyle Galbraith
26.03.31
What we need from CI for agentic engineering
Agents can write and push code in seconds, but CI still takes minutes to give them feedback. That mismatch is the biggest bottleneck in agentic engineering today, and it's why CI needed to be rebuilt from scratch.


Andrew "Watts" Watkins
26.03.11
How I make support suck less
Offload the scavenger-hunt grunt work to agents, log the useful bits (also with an agent) so the problem is discoverable next time, and spit out the day's support recap in seconds.


Andrew "Watts" Watkins
26.02.12
My intuition doesn't work anymore
I used an LLM to refactor a 1500-line mess into clean, organized code. I realized months later that agents were the only ones working in it. They didn't need the clean code. They didn't need my empathy. My intuitions as an engineer just don't work anymore.


Kyle Galbraith
26.02.02
The bottleneck has shifted from writing code to integrating it
AI can help write your feature in 20 minutes. But if your CI pipeline also takes 20 minutes, you've just traded one bottleneck for another. The bottleneck in software development has shifted from writing code to integrating it, and our workflows haven't caught up.
Older posts
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The 3 fears that make engineering suck

Andrew "Watts" Watkins
Perspectives
26.01.14
How support shapes the product at Depot

Pedro Guerra
Perspectives
25.12.19
A marketer's hour of hell: What I finally get about slow builds

Tori Elstrom
Perspectives
25.10.23
What technical writers actually do at startups

Andrea Anderson
Perspectives
25.10.09
Git is really cool, actually

Billy Batista
Perspectives
25.09.24
Using AI as my engineering copilot (not autopilot)

Iris Scholten
Perspectives
25.09.05
Monorepos: Worth the hype?

Billy Batista
Perspectives
25.08.22
The hidden cost of self hosting CI runners

John Stocks
Perspectives
25.08.08
DevOps to finance: Explaining CI costs to your CFO

John Stocks
Perspectives
25.06.12
Why platform teams are focused on CI/CD optimization

Tori Elstrom
Perspectives
25.06.04