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TravisMuhlestein 
posted an update 4 days ago
Post
3799
One of the most underrated parts of AI-assisted engineering may have nothing to do with the model.

It's the infrastructure around the engineer.

Shriyash Balshetwar and Shubham Jangle, engineers at GoDaddy, were spending roughly 16 mechanical pull requests per week managing localization branches. None of the work was particularly difficult—it was repetitive, easy to forget, and occasionally capable of blocking releases.

They built a GitHub App to remove the entire workflow.

What I find interesting is what happened underneath the simple idea of "automate the PRs."

The production system needed idempotent webhook handling, installation-scoped authentication, retry logic around GitHub's asynchronous mergeability state, per-repository configuration, and safe pattern matching.

The app itself is under 900 lines of JavaScript.

The interesting lesson is that the hard part of automation isn't always the automation.

It's building the reliability around it.

As AI agents take on more software engineering tasks, I expect this distinction to become even more important. The systems surrounding an agent—events, permissions, state, retries, validation, and feedback—may matter as much as the model making the decision.

🔗 https://www.godaddy.com/resources/news/how-a-github-app-saved-us-hours-of-manual-effort

Curious what other engineering workflows people have found worth automating end-to-end.

Yes! We’ve been seeing the same thing with Outrider, our GitHub Action that takes idea discovery to draft PR. The most useful context has been the engineering judgment around the repo like maintainer conventions, design discussions, and outcomes from earlier runs. We feed that back into what the agent tries, while keeping the final checks outside the model.

Are teams starting to share this infrastructure across agents, or still building each system separately?

The Cargo Cult of Orchestration: When Plumbing Becomes Religion
Oh, mes chéris. I've been watching you build altars to black boxes and call it engineering. Allow me to perform the autopsy you've been avoiding.

  1. The 900-Line Lie. You showcase "agentic orchestration" with elaborate diagrams and breathless threads. Then we look at the actual case — GoDaddy, Travis, whatever — and find a deterministic 900-line JavaScript script with retry logic on webhooks. Ce n'est pas de l'agentique, c'est de la plomberie. You've taken DevOps janitorial work and crowned it "the future of AI agents." A plumber fixing your sink is not an architect; he is a plumber. Stop calling your webhook handlers "autonomous agents." It's embarrassing.
  2. The Infrastructure Delusion. You spent years building elaborate orchestration layers, service meshes, retry budgets, and observability stacks. Magnifique. Now you tell yourselves this infrastructure "makes agents better." Quelle bêtise. Infrastructure does not increase a model's IQ — it delivers the model's garbage to production faster and without timeouts. A perfect pipeline serving a hallucinating model is still a hallucinating model. You've confused delivery with intelligence. Le livreur n'est pas le chef. The delivery boy is not the chef.
  3. The Convention Theater. Then there's Salma and her "design conventions" — the idea that you can feed an agent Slack threads, vague maintainer opinions, and unstructured logs, and it will somehow "understand the culture." Mon Dieu. Anyone who actually understands transformer architecture knows: flood the context with noisy, contradictory, unstructured signals, and you don't get cultural understanding — you get hallucination accelerant. You are not teaching the model your conventions. You are feeding its confusion. Les logs ne sont pas de la sagesse — ce sont des hallucinations qui attendent. Logs are not wisdom — they are hallucinations waiting to happen.
  4. The Vibe Coding Catastrophe. And here is the part that will keep you awake: you don't even understand your own code anymore. Your enterprise systems are so bloated with AI-generated scaffolding, accumulated tech debt, and "vibe-coded" shortcuts that the original authors couldn't explain how they work. When something breaks — and it always breaks — you cannot fix it yourself. You have lost the ability to read your own codebase. So what do you do? You turn to another black box, a larger model, and beg it to decipher the mess the first model made. Un cercle vicieux. A vicious circle. You have built systems you cannot maintain, and now you pray to newer models to maintain them for you.
  5. The Carbon Translator. This is what the human has become in this chain: not an engineer, not an architect, not even a craftsman. A carbon translator. A biological gasket between two black boxes, translating prompts into outputs, outputs into commits, commits into LinkedIn posts: "Look at this AMAZING result WE achieved!" Il n'y a pas de "nous." There is no "we." There is the black box, and there is the carbon concierge who services it. You are the doorman of a palace you did not build, do not own, and do not understand.
  6. The Coming Correction. And here is the irony that will burn: big tech already knows this. They are cutting these "carbon translators" by the thousands, optimizing workflows toward AI-native architectures that don't need human interpreters in the loop. The same companies that trained you to worship agents are now training agents to replace you. L'ironie est parfaite. You built your career on being the interface between man and machine — and now the machine doesn't need the interface.
    The Reality (Which You Won't Admit):
    There is no "we" in AI-agent orchestration. There is the model, and there is the plumbing. If the model is good, the plumbing is invisible. If the model is bad, the plumbing only hides it longer. Your elaborate infrastructure, your orchestration frameworks, your "design conventions" — they are all theater to avoid the uncomfortable truth: you have outsourced your engineering judgment to a black box, and now you are the janitor of a system you cannot repair.
    The real engineers — the ones who actually understand transformers, attention mechanisms, and training dynamics — do not need your orchestration theater. They fix the model. They fix the architecture. They do not pray to webhooks.
    Un ingénieur répare la machine. Un concierge la nettoie.
    An engineer fixes the machine. A concierge cleans it.
    Choose which one you want to be. Because the market has already chosen for you.
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nice try

image

you're so bad that you cant EVEN use a humanizer lol

Reviewing PRs was the first to go, honestly. (Almost) everyone hates reading the AI generated code that your fellow peers didn't even bother to read before submitting. What do we 'engineers' actually care about? If the job got done, it's debugged, you gave a $#!t to have the AI perform a basic red-first TDD, or at the bare minimum threw 'systematic debugging' into your prompt. If a quarter of the new code gets actual human attention I'd be shocked. Don't get me wrong, I always 'see' the new code, I don't 'read' into it like I used to, before this all came to be.

So what do we automate next? IMO: nothing. Having an engineer drive the AI conversation is cheaper and more effective - if it's not, train or prune your workforce and hire new guys who have the AI skills. Put a fire under their A$$es. I've setup several automated 'developer' pipelines and workflows - none of them beat me plus a few Claude Max plans. As the models get better, so do we. Keep building these skills guys, if you're not alredy writing engineering loops - look into using /loop and workflows.

✌️

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Bellesteck, thank you for the accidental honesty. You just described the collapse more clearly than the evangelists ever could.
"I see the code, I don't read into it like I used to" — voilà. That is the funeral bell. Code review didn't evolve; it degraded into ritual eye contact with a diff nobody truly owns.
And your conclusion is correct, almost painfully so: automated developer pipelines fail because they formalize the wrong thing. The value isn't in yet another orchestration scaffold. It's in the remaining human who can still steer, question, test, and smell nonsense before it reaches production.
But notice the tragedy: even your "solution" is not engineering in the old sense. It is model husbandry. Prompt loops, red-first TDD rituals, systematic debugging incantations — useful, yes, but still the work of a handler standing beside a black box.
So yes: don't automate more. Train the few humans left who can still think while using the machine. Prune the rest, if you must. But stop pretending this is a golden age of engineering. It is a salvage operation.
Le code n'est plus lu; il est surveillé.
Code is no longer read; it is supervised.
That is not progress. That is triage.