Imprint’s average engineer is merging 4x more PRs than 2 years ago. Yay. Aggregated behind the average is something even more interesting: we have two teams that are merging 10x their PRs over that period. One engineer is merging 25x the PRs per week of our average engineer two years ago, and a number of others are closing in on that number. That’s pretty neat, and the slope of the line suggests our average in a year is going to look much closer to today’s p90 than today’s p50. Even more importantly, we aren’t just shipping more, our quality has improved: incidents are down 42% half-over-half, and critical incidents are down 78% half-over-half. I think we’ve always known the quality/velocity tradeoff wasn’t a particularly useful construct, but that’s undeniable today.
Better tools made Copilot code review worse. Here's how we actually improved it.
How migrating Copilot code review to shared Unix-style code exploration tools reduced review cost by reshaping agent workflows around pull request evidence.
Using AI to write better code more slowly
A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it! But t…
Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear
In early 2023 at an offsite in Tenerife, our European engineering team did a series of exercises that ended up changing the way we work.
202605 - apenwarr
In recent months I've heard of several teams with an interesting policy: each pull request should be no more than a few files, and no more than a certain number of lines (say 500). And do just one thing and do it well. And be easy for a human to review. And be fully tested by the test suite.
Don’t Create Chaos
A guide to scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to past $100M ARR
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
Adoption and Impact of Command-Line AI Coding Agents: A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
Organizations rolling out agentic command line tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub's Copilot CLI need to know who will try them, who will keep using them, and whether the tools produce enough output to justify their cost. At organizational scale, token spend can run into millions of dollars annually, so misreading adoption, retention, or impact can make a rollout expensive without changing engineering velocity. Studying tens of thousands of engineers at Microsoft over its early-2026 rollout, we find that first use spread primarily through social networks, retention was associated more with engineers' coding activity than with demographics, and adopters merged roughly 24% more pull requests than they would have otherwise. We use merged pull requests as our proxy for output -- acknowledging that a merged PR is not the same as the value it delivers -- and the lift persists across our four-month window. These results suggest that CLI coding agents are neither uniformly adopted nor mere novelty effects and that organizations should treat visible peer use as central to rollout strategy.
Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time
An overview of what’s changed in engineering during the last six months, how various tech companies are changing how they work, and why slowing down could be a sensible strategy
Declaring Systems Bankruptcy
For years and years, I’ve helped teams evaluate their systems, fix their systems, tweak their systems, and evolve their systems. And sometimes it’s even been necessary to help teams declare bankruptcy on their systems, blow them up, and start anew. And now it’s my turn. It started as a slow re
A Guide to Measuring Engineering Team Performance
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” While software development practices constantly change, there will always be a tier of truly top engineering teams who stand above…
Speedstrapping Playbook: Maximize Growth with Minimal Dilution DRAFT
Speedstrap Playbook Published version here - Part 1 + Part 2 Beta Version .9 - October 2025 “...my gut is we have a problem. The system as it exists today promotes less liquidity, less traditional, high quality company building and way higher burn rates. That’s just not a great combination from m...
Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus before
Why AI Makes Things Worse for Enterprise Teams, by Paul Ford
Why are so few engineering teams reaping the benefits of AI? On this week’s episode, Paul presents Rich with the findings from a recent report from CircleCI and
GitHub Stacked PRs
Break large changes into small, reviewable, stacked pull requests with first-class GitHub support.