AI Chat: ChatGPT, AI News, Artificial Intelligence, OpenAI, Machine Learning Buildkite CTO on the New AI Engineering Reality | Spriha Baruah Tucker
Dec 18, 2025
Spriha Barua Tucker, Field CTO at Buildkite and two-time Y Combinator founder, shares her insights on the evolving landscape of AI in engineering. She emphasizes that AI adoption is not simply plug-and-play; it requires human oversight and a clear understanding of tools like GitHub Copilot and Cloud Code. Spriha advises companies to start small with focused experiments to gauge AI's impact, while also outlining the importance of trust and verification in automated systems. Her pragmatic approach encourages mapping AI capabilities to existing challenges for effective integration.
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How A Customer Jingle Sparked A Hire
- Spriha Baruah Tucker first heard of BuildKite because a customer made an internal jingle and infomercial praising the tool.
- She emailed the founder and that started her relationship with BuildKite which led to her joining the company.
Process Matters More Than Raw AI Power
- Spriha warns that unleashing AI agents across a large codebase without process will produce fleeting results.
- Teams that expect imperfect input and build guardrails handle AI agents far better.
Dev Platforms Already Solve AI Scale Problems
- Dev platform teams that already expect messy submissions have validation systems and feedback loops in place.
- Those teams adapt to AI agents faster because they already managed human-generated imperfections.