Navigating AI in Software Development

Merrill Lutsky, co-founder and CEO of Graphite, discusses their evolution from stack diff workflows to Diamond, an AI code review agent that just helped secure their $50M Series B. He shares insights on building reliable AI review systems, why over-generating and pruning comments works better than single responses, and the shift from RAG to agentic code browsing. Merrill offers a provocative vision where developers define requirements and AI agents build the code, potentially eliminating traditional IDE coding. This episode provides valuable perspectives on how AI is fundamentally reshaping software development workflows and engineering roles.

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction and Graphite overview
01:58 - Evolution from stack diffs to AI review
07:39 - Diamond: The AI code reviewer explained
10:13 - Human vs AI review: Finding the balance
11:44 - Engineering challenges of reliable AI review
17:38 - Over-generate and prune: A winning strategy
24:49 - From RAG to code browser agents
28:12 - The bitter lesson of AI engineering
30:48 - The future of software engineering
37:33 - Is AI over or under-hyped?