This week I turned a few of my most experienced teammates — and myself — into AI code-review personas. Each one is built from around a thousand of their real review comments, so it reviews the way they actually do.
Mine was the funniest to write. My number one move in a review, by far, is just asking "Why?" Often the whole review is one word. So that's the first rule in my persona. The AI version of me is, accurately, a single skeptical "why?" on every diff.
The others have their own fingerprints. One is security-first. One reads prompts and tool descriptions as hard as code — "this is a book," "too many tokens." One always asks "don't we already have this?" before you add new code.
Now they run as a gate before I push: each persona reviews in turn and keeps going until it has nothing left to complain about.
The funny part: writing each persona made me see my own habits from the outside. Turns out I really do just ask "why?" a lot.
If you can describe how your best reviewers think, you can get some of that judgment on every change — not just the ones they happen to catch.
I use Claude with the mabl MCP to create mabl tests. A lot.
New CLI feature? Sure, I write the integration test. Then I also ask Claude to create a mabl test that proves the feature works for real.
This week I'm improving the flow merge page. To work on that page I need a merge conflict, and a merge conflict takes some setup. Create a test with a flow. Branch it. Edit the flow on the branch. Go back to master and change the same flow there. That's a lot of clicking just to reach the screen I want to fix.
So now I type "Claude, use mabl and do that for me!" My job is to fix the merge page, not to make merge conflicts by hand.
Time to optimize your cloud estate. "Ship it" is no longer the end of development.
Dust off the 12 optional optimizations you never shipped because they died in Jira. Feed the fallow tickets into the agent forge. Now is the time for the work we never had bandwidth to do.
Last week, I dusted off an old ML pipeline—long considered too complex to replumb. No problem: select the fanciest LLM model, crank it to MAX effort, and feed it some good ideas.
Flatten and optimize queries? Done.
Materialize all views? Done.
Cache expensive calls in Redis? Done.
Vectorize computations and push down to machine instructions? Done.
Build a comprehensive end-to-end validation harness and suite to ensure these changes break nothing? Check.
OK... 98% cheaper? Pencils down.
It's time to revisit everything you've ever shipped. Juice that lemon until it turns to diamond. Capacity and expertise are no longer the limit. With agent weights and your horse sense, 98% optimization is table stakes.
Lean in. Today you can ask harder questions and produce more thorough analyses than ever before. You're the most capable you've ever been. Time to live your best coding life. Let's say you want to optimize your org's 100 CI workflows? You better instrument disk, memory, CPU, and network usage — OK... done. Now analyze the last 10K builds: what's the optimal build instance shape for _each individual_ workflow? Done. Now shadow-roll five custom instance shapes, raise dozens of PRs to consume them, and run 300 test builds. Done. Data? Reviewed. Statistical analysis, completed. Resources saved: 40%. Builds broken: zero.
You wouldn't have allocated the month it'd take to do this kind of work in 2024, but it's 2026 and your agent fleet just did it for you over the weekend.
It's always been true that if you don't give a team enough scope, they'll fill whatever scope you do give them, usually further than you anticipated. I've watched that at the team level for years. What's new is watching it happen to individuals. The people who were already deep in devops are building more devops, and better devops. Same with the framework people, the networking people, the ones who care about UX polish. Everyone leans into what they already know. Personal backlogs are filling up and getting churned through faster than they used to. This is largely a very good thing. But it does create some interesting challenges around how we think about architecture, prioritization, and team commitments, and we're still working through those.
I've been deleting a lot of code lately and I cannot tell you how good it feels. I cleared out about 400 stale translation keys — the kind that accumulate over years and that nobody dares touch, because who still knows what references them? The agent knows; it checks every reference in seconds, so the sweep I'd always filed under "someday" turned into an afternoon. And Eugene and Jeff finally pulled out Bootstrap (BOOTSTRAP! the framework we've been trying to get rid of for years!) — thank you both, truly. I re-ran our UI library market share report afterward and that's when the impact really landed: Bootstrap is finally gone.
What surprised me is how the agents change the math. Migrating class components to function components with hooks, ripping out an old framework, pruning dead i18n — these were always "we should do this eventually" jobs that lost every prioritization fight. The cost of removing code and cleaning up our codebases dropped enough that now we just... do it. I keep catching myself opening diffs hoping they're mostly red.