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Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

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Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#21
post #18

Great I think you made a good choice by interfacing directly to PRs. I'd like to see if I'm able to get my code coverage to 100% with this bot.

Let's do it, we'll be online to help in the discord https://discord.com/invite/sweep-ai. It'll also help if you have GitHub actions to run the tests, do you have it setup?

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#22
Finally! My VP of engineering keeps saying I'm not making enough github commits, this is the solution I've been waiting for!

This is sarcasm, but I did have a VP who tracked commit frequency for a while. And people heard about it if they weren't commiting enough.

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, small shops definitely benefit. Fewer people means each person already knows more of the codebase. For a 3 person team they might know >50% each, while for a 10 person team they might only know 10%. The previous belief here would be the 10 person gets more work done, but that will change as AI developers like Sweep become more popular. There are a lot of additional benefits for small teams, like fewer meetings +…

It remains to be seen whether that’s a benefit. This tool replaces experience junior engineers have needed to become better developers. Its future value is dependent strongly on the assumption that AI tools like this will evolve quickly enough to make using them more valuable than other experience. After all, if it doesn’t keep pace, the two-tier system I mentioned in my other comment will definitively be such that s…

Interesting, that change would take some time to materialize. In the meantime it might be best to adopt both? I don't see it as a complete substitute.

Right now you could have some junior devs picking up work that Sweep can't handle in order to grow and learn, and eventually still become senior devs. Having a small team also helps with mentorship (more focused attention).

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#25

Finally! My VP of engineering keeps saying I'm not making enough github commits, this is the solution I've been waiting for! This is sarcasm, but I did have a VP who tracked commit frequency for a while. And people heard about it if they weren't commiting enough.

Haha, that's a bad way to measure output. Unfortunately the commits are attributed to Sweep ;)

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#26
post #24

Tightly related to https://second.dev , also a YC company in the previous batch. Though Second is specializing its AI developers to doing code migrations.

Cool! We're focused on close integration with GitHub and handling smaller, more focused tasks. We also have plans to run Sweep migrations, let me know if you'd like to see that!

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#27

Interesting that your tagline is "spend less time writing, more time reviewing code" in the video. Developers already don't like reading the code, we even have a ubiquitous acronym for it. Writing is the fun part. In my experience, junior developers become mid level developers by writing code, by practicing, by building small features, by doing grunt work. If they wanted to use an AI to do those tasks for them, I wou…

You're assuming that there is a large number of junior devs waiting for the opportunity to learn.

What if you have the opposite - a large number of relatively simple bugs waiting to get fixed and not enough junior devs do the work?

I think Sweep is a great idea and all of the additional developer capacity will be greedily soaked up by understaffed organisations.

How well it works will depend on how good those pull requests are. If it takes too much time of senior developers to review the pull requests then that is a problem.

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value prop is to hire fewer junior devs or even replace them. They don't mean to help junior devs. Also, I'm not sure if you'd enjoy writing code for those "grunt work". I'd love PRs that I can easily check correctness for and would get some small job done.

Sweep is targeted towards senior devs that can do two things. 1. review code quickly 2. articulate requirements well Also, here's another example of "grunt work". Sweep added a banner to our landing page, and I didn't touch my IDE at all. https://github.com/sweepai/landing-page/pull/226

I would honestly just ignore that feedback. It's needlessly reductive and oxymoronic (coding is fun! But give juniors boring grunt work)

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#29

Interesting that your tagline is "spend less time writing, more time reviewing code" in the video. Developers already don't like reading the code, we even have a ubiquitous acronym for it. Writing is the fun part. In my experience, junior developers become mid level developers by writing code, by practicing, by building small features, by doing grunt work. If they wanted to use an AI to do those tasks for them, I wou…

You're assuming that there is a large number of junior devs waiting for the opportunity to learn. What if you have the opposite - a large number of relatively simple bugs waiting to get fixed and not enough junior devs do the work? I think Sweep is a great idea and all of the additional developer capacity will be greedily soaked up by understaffed organisations. How well it works will depend on how good those pull re…

I really agree with the second point. Even if there are enough junior devs, there's small issues where you're on the go and delegating is relatively expensive as the expected turn-around time is generally in the hours. Often times I would just do it myself, but then it burns part of the stamina. Also we're trying to make reviewing easier with webpage previews and automated testing through Github actions.

Re: Launch HN: Sweep (YC S23) – A bot to create simple PRs in your codebase

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweep is targeted towards senior devs that can do two things. 1. review code quickly 2. articulate requirements well Also, here's another example of "grunt work". Sweep added a banner to our landing page, and I didn't touch my IDE at all. https://github.com/sweepai/landing-page/pull/226

I would honestly just ignore that feedback. It's needlessly reductive and oxymoronic (coding is fun! But give juniors boring grunt work)

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