GitHub Copilot, Clean Context, Automated Testing & AI Coding Agents with Lars Gyrup Brink Nielsen [MVP]

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Welcome back to the M665FM podcast.

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Today we are talking about one of the biggest shifts

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happening in software development right now.

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For the last few years, AI assist development

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has largely made out of complete code generation chat

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interfaces.

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And yeah, and give some co-pilot to the people.

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But now we are entering a different phase.

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We are moving from AI that helps developers write code

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towards AI agents that can perform development work.

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They can inspect repositories, understand issues,

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modify files, run tests, reason over failure,

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create and pull requests, and potentially work

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through entry engine task.

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And that's changed the problem.

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Because one of the AI agents starts operating inside a large

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product code base.

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The biggest challenge is no longer simply where

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the model can generate wild, type scripting.

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The request to become what context does the agent receive,

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how does it understand the architecture,

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how do you set now your team standards,

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and how you stop it from making locally correct,

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but architecture of terrible decisions.

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And how do you verify that the work in products

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is actually safe and merge?

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My guest today is Lars Bureau Brink Nielsen.

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I always manage writer.

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That was pretty good.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Microsoft MVP in development technologies.

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And X-Chemchin, Github Star Aluminum,

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book author, international speaker,

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take writer, resource, meditator, and community organizer.

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If I have forgotten something, you can correct me.

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Lars has extensive experience across

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from development, cloud native systems,

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debodder parks, periods, out of maging, testing,

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continuous delivery, and deployment.

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And yeah, what calls a "gentake experience"

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is also been working with Github co-pilot since early days,

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and he spent more than a more than a year

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automating open source software development.

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More recently, Lars has been codified team standards,

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especially for a eye-coding agents,

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and one of the hardest problems in large

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mono-respresenting clean context.

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So today, we are going deep into Github co-pilot,

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type scripting, and X-play, write, automated testing,

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and so on.

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Yeah, Lars, welcome to the ELX-65 podcast.

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I hope I haven't forgotten anything.

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Thank you.

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There's always more about that.

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That was a lot.

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Thank you for remembering all of that.

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Yeah.

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Lars, before we get into the AI agent topic,

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let's start a little bit with your background.

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You worked across very broad range of development technologies.

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What organically pulled you into software development,

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and why did JavaScript become your favorite programming

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language?

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Oh, then we have to go a long way back,

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because I guess already as a child,

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I got interested in computers.

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I'm from 1986.

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I just turned 40 years a few weeks ago,

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and got my first Commodore 64 as five years old boy,

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and that's what got me hooked, basically.

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I couldn't program, but just having to enter

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commands on a keyboard and insert cassette tapes and things

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like that, that was just really, really interesting to me,

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to get to play games.

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And then I started tinkering with computers back then,

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as you might remember, it was not that easy to set up and install drivers,

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and install windows and operating systems, and all that.

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It was not nearly as easy as it is today,

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so you had to know a thing or two about computers and how

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they work and building your own hard,

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collecting different sets of hardware,

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like the motherboard and the RAMs,

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and everything had to fit together,

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and you had to plug them in and connect them

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to the case and all of that.

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So I'm really interested in that type of engineering work,

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and how things work generally also been into engines,

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but that's for another discussion.

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But what then got me interested in programming itself was

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when my neighbor visited me, and he had just started in the 10th grade,

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and they had an HTML course in his school.

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So he taught me the basics of that, and that's, I never stopped from then,

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and that's 25 years ago, 26 years ago.

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So I always knew that I wanted to be something with computers.

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I didn't know what, exactly.

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But I ended up studying computer science,

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got a bachelor's degree, and then I've been working professionally

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with software for 14 years now, but I was really tinkering with it for,

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yeah, 25, 26 years doing hobby projects, and hand coding HTML,

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and CSS, and JavaScript, and even before,

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there was any CSS, and there was barely any JavaScript, and so on.

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And then you're asking me, "Miracle, how did JavaScript become my favorite language?"

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Well, it was just always the web platform that intrigued me,

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since my neighbor visited me and taught me HTML,

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and I could get something on the screen on my own,

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just by writing something in Notepad, and then opening it in a browser.

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That was really, really cool to me, and you could view the source of any webpage,

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copy some snippets, and tinker around like that,

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and make it look like things that people know,

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like giving in a Windows XP theme on your website, things like that.

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So, yeah, that was really what got me interested,

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and then I just kept going.

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When I was studying computer science, it was the first wave of mobile applications,

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but I still wanted to bet on the web,

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and today mobile applications are more common,

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but back then it was sort of a bubble at first.

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Everyone was doing mobile applications, but then they stopped for a while.

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Now it's more common again, but for many years,

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that wasn't the best idea, and the web apps were more interesting.

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And I still think web apps are more interesting,

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and they can do almost the same things as native mobile apps,

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from my perspective.

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Well, you have so many experience in JavaScript.

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How did the ecosystem like when you start and what is today?

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Yeah, well, when I started 15, 16 years old,

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I didn't have a code editor, I was writing a note pad.

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I even wrote pen and paper, PHP code, for example.

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And then I had to imagine how that worked without having a real server

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in real computer. I took some pearl courses as well,

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outside of school hours, and so going, coming from,

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that was the most basic form of programming or web development for me.

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And then when I got into professional development,

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let's see, I think it was around the time where you had to have backward compatibility with

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Internet Explorer 8, and sort of the first, a second round of application frameworks in JavaScript,

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were just coming along. It was AngularJS, was big view, no, not view that wasn't there yet.

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Ember was then the first version of React was released a few years later,

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or around that time. And responsive web design was pretty, pretty new. And I remember we were

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rewriting a big software system, and my CTO at the time thought it was a waste of time to

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make it work on tablets. Nobody wanted to use it on tablets. And my perspective was,

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well, if they don't want to use it on tablets, it's probably because it doesn't work on tablets. Maybe if

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you designed it responsibly for tablets, even mobile phones, even mobile first, then maybe people

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want to use it. The users want to use it because it's a pretty good experience, right? And of course,

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that turned out to be right, as I see things. Yeah, it's funny. I started nearly the same way,

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but I make all the wrong decision you can do. I think first it was a Dolby Flash, I think, then

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Silverlight that I do it is a CSS course, but yeah, you have done the JavaScript and a TypeScript.

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Why become so essential part of your development workflow? TypeScript in particular, or JavaScript,

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or TypeScript? Well, I didn't choose it in the beginning of my career. I had to pick a framework.

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Well, I actually initially, I didn't, I also didn't pick AngularJS. I picked something called

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Nugout. JS by people, some people at Microsoft, Steve Sanderson, a few other people. And with a small

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JavaScript framework, you didn't have to compile it. There was a template language,

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similar to what Angular, the modern Angular has today, but it worked at runtime. Of course,

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that also set some limitations for how complex the application can be. But they did have one good

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primitive in Nugout. JS. They had observables, and that was before Angular got obsessed with RxJS

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observables. But unfortunately, they also had two-way data binding, which turned out to be

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not so scalable for big applications. But we were really just getting started back then at what

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was possible. Single-page application was a pretty new concept to do mainstream. I mean, Gmail was

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one of the first success stories of that. That was some years earlier, but to do it in an enterprise

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setting was still relatively new, and not something that was a given, that you could do as single-page

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application in JavaScript. No, no, you could just use the server-side technologies like ASP.NET,

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then PHP, GlareVel, and Ruby, and Python, all of that.

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Oh, yeah, Ruby arrays. Oh, that's what I was all about. Ruby and Rails, Django, things like that.

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They go at all times. Yeah. Normally, I ask your MVP, I ask about the MVP title by the year.

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You have so many other titles. The addicts champion, you are a GitHub star, you are also an

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outro, a maintainer, and community organization. How important has Open Source been shaping the way

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you think about software engineering? Well, just a small correction. I'm not a GitHub star anymore.

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I was for four years as a zone, I'm an alum, so I'm just mentioned as a form of GitHub star.

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So I'm not directly involved in that community program anymore. I am an active Microsoft MVP,

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as you mentioned, and have been so for, I think, seven years straight at this point, I'm involved

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in the NX Champions program as well, around the NX tool chain, and now the Polygraph product,

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which is brand new from the NX team as well. But yeah, Open Source, well, I love Open Source. I love

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Learning in public. I love the idea of Open Source. I like building things with Open Source,

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and especially now with AI coding agents, where you can actually sit one person and get a lot of

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stuff done, because of the amplification that the AI coding agents gives you. So now I'm trying all

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sorts of things. I've been doing that for more than a year now, just things I couldn't do before,

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because it would take too much time for me to invest in my personal time just to learn something,

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and then be able to do it. Now you can either the AI already knows, or you can point it to some

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documentation and books and articles, things like that, and then it can learn in a matter of minutes or

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hours. And that's what's insane about AI coding agents, that it really gives you superpowers.

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It becomes superhuman. And yeah, circling back to Open Source, well, I have contributed to Open Source

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for, I think, 12 years or so. I've been part of a few Open Source teams. I still make

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contributions every year to various ecosystems like Angular, I maintain some Angular,

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testing and logging libraries as well as state management. And I do a lot of personal

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Open Source projects, just because I think it's interesting and because I'm suddenly capable of

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doing things I didn't, I hadn't learned yet before. For example, I just created a type checker

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for the Angular framework where it only does type checking. So it doesn't do the build or the

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compilation. It just does the type checking step, but it does it fast and then combine it with this

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NX tool chain. You can do it per project in a large code base and then enable NX

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cashing on top of that. And that gives that that's really good for an AI because that helps it the way

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of making a static analysis of the code really fast for particular slice of the code.

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>> Yeah, yeah. Before I start a record session, I look a little bit about my guest and I also use AI

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and normally I ask, "What is the term?" The guest, he was frequently, and for me or for the AI

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say, you use the term development experience quite a lot. >> Oh. >> Well, that's correct, definitely

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correct. I didn't know that I used it a lot, but it's definitely what I've been focusing on a lot

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professionally, especially. >> What do developer experience actually mean to you?

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>> I don't have a definition ready, but just on top of my mind, but to me it's removing friction in

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the tooling you use in a specific code base or within a team or an organization. So for example,

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I have been in a lot of so-called systems teams or platform teams where we have

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built software to enable other teams to build software on top of that software within a company,

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large organizations usually. So we would set up the tooling like CI pipelines and automate

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testing frameworks and NX and dot-net solutions and all that kind of stuff and then make reusable

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packages for setting up new projects, documentation, how to courses for writing tests and

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optimizing the CI pipelines again and picking a date time framework for dot-net and all those

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kind of things that makes the other teams support them in having to, yeah, they can spend more time

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writing product code and they might not have a big knowledge in this area of all these tooling

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and schematics and testing and all of that, but when they get these reusable software components,

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then it becomes easier for them and you have unbought them and then they can spend more time doing

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what is the priority of their team. Interesting. I think a little bit what for you, it's a poor

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developer experience, what is a good one and what separates it from an excellent one.

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Well, I'll give you a couple of examples of very poor development experience.

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So one you definitely have tried yourself, it's deploying to production via FTP.

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So you take, for example, a PHP files or multiple usually and you'll just upload it to a production

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server via FSP and then you check did it work or did I just break production? So a lot of setups used

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to be that many many years ago at this point and sometimes you would even sit and edit

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or I saw some people sitting and editing the code directly on the production server.

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So there was not even source control, it was just edit the file on the server and then you hope

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you have a backup and there's no version control. That's a very poor developer experience.

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The room for the margin for error is so big, there are so many things that can go wrong and

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will go wrong. And would you say makes a good one to your nearly perfect awesome, I don't know,

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to to to outstanding, I say, I use out, I use out, well, I'll just give you one more poor example.

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So I was at a web or web agency or e-commerce agency, we have many clients.

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And so when you would start work on a client's project, there was a shared file server

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in the internal network. So and there wasn't again, there was no source code, no version control,

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not that they didn't exist. This organization just hadn't adopted them. There was no

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Git, no subversion, nothing like that. So instead, they would make a zip archive of the source code

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and then put it in the shared file server. So when the next person came, they would take that

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zip file, copy it to their own machine, unzip it, work on the code,

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zip it back, put it back on the production server, override the existing file.

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But then sometimes, I don't know if you can guess what happened.

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No, no. You would have to start working on a project and you go into the file server

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and there was no file, there was no zip file, no source code,

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because instead of copying the file, the previous person had moved it to their own machine and

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not put it back. Oh, how often this, oh yeah, fuck yeah, this was so often then.

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That's that support developer experience.

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Well, yeah, I really forgotten this, oh my god, this was so often.

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And what would you say make good to, to ask me?

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So what's a good developer experience? Well, these days is it's a lot also about the

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agent tech experience. So, but we can talk more about that later maybe, but for the developer

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experience, to me, it's a lot about the development ruling. So having the right,

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I mean, shouldn't be specific to an editor, should be able, ideally, to use any editor,

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your editor of preference, but maybe the framework decisions have been made, for example,

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for the web application framework, but also for the testing framework, the testing runner,

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the built tool chain, the bundler, the development server, the storybook, for example,

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set up for your reusable front end components when you're building front end like me.

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And maybe even, so I'm a big fan of NX and one of the things you can do there is you can set up

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a project you can add tags. So you can add any metadata per project. And then based on that,

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you can make architectural boundaries, which is really important in a large code base. So you can

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say this type of project can only depend on that type of projects of the classical N tier

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architecture, for example, with database extraction layer at the bottom and business logic,

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and then maybe UI top. So you can make enforcement of that through

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lint rules added by NX when you add your own metadata per project. I think that's really

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nice for waking in a large code base. That's one example. And the other one is, so maybe you have a

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special naming convention for your large code base. But you can't, it's so complicated that you can

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even remember all the details yourself or anyone on the team. So then you make

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and what's called an NX generator, which can scaffold projects or front end components or

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services or whatever that follow that naming convention to the dot. And then of course, you add

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a lint rule on top of that so that no matter whether it was generated by the NX generator

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or by an AI agent or by a human handwriting it or copy and pasting it or maybe it got

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stale from an old branch, then the lint will catch it and say, oh, you're not following the

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naming convention. You should use this format instead. So having a lot of CI checks like that,

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that you can run locally and it goes into the CI pipelines. That's one example of a good

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developer experience to me. And then taking it to another extreme is what you mentioned in the

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beginning, continuous delivery and continuous deployments. I don't know how familiar you are

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with those terms, what you've done in that area yourself. I use the tools for it. Yeah.

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It's, yeah, I like it. Especially I'm more the tool guy. So I like to be guided from item

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well from DevOps, the git on it, so on. And I get my steps because I'm what a real corner.

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I'm more an architect. And so I speak to the people. They have more experience like you.

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But you've used GitOps as well. I heard you mentioned GitOps. What was that like?

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It's worse. I really fear I'm a deaf-optist guy. I hate it for the start, but I love all these

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kind of automation and versioning. And it's worse. I don't know. I think I use both to know together

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because I have my my my my boards. I have my my clear overview about my GitOps. It's so good. I think,

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yes, how was it? First, I feel very bad because as I started, deaf-optists don't have this

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integration. And I hate it. I don't use it. I say, no, no, no, no. But now I think it's, yeah,

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it's worked for me. Yeah, I think it's feels, I'm not perfect, but good.

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So yeah, so you've used, I don't know if I confused what you said, did you say GitHub or GitOps?

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The GitHub. Oh, I thought you said GitOps. Oh, because that's more bleeding edge, even more than

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continuous delivery, continuous deployment. I mean, they can be combined, but have you heard about

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GitOps? No, no. So similar to DevOps, but Git instead of DevOps, so GitOps. So that's a way of

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managing your environments and deployments and releases in a Git repo. Sometimes the same repo,

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and some infrastructure folder, sometimes in a separate repo. And then there are a lot of tool

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chains that can, yeah, that solves all the problems that come with that. Because I used it for a project,

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and we sort of build our own with some existing tool chains, but then we built some custom GitHub

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workflows and actions on top of that to make it work so that we could have a MOLSI

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repo system where we could have one of these GitOps environment reposts that could connect

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with all the other repo so that you could, for example, open a pull request and then an entire Kubernetes

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cluster with real databases and all of that was set up just for your one pull request

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with a preview or testing environment so that you could see it in a production-like environment.

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Of course, it wasn't to the scale of our production systems, but it was a real environment,

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was running on real Kubernetes cluster, was spinning up all the real containers and so on,

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just on slightly worse hardware, not production servers. But that was so incredible to see that

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and use that, but I also know that it took four months for the team to build that,

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and in those four months we didn't build any features. So, and of course, you always know the balance

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of make features or improve the development experience or the deployments, the workflows,

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or whatever. That's always the, what, which one do you choose? Yeah, there are some cool things

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we'll talk about. Let's take the NX stuff a little bit later. You say monoreps or large monoreps.

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I'm more working because my brain works, so I'm more than multi-independent

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respiratory guy. What, why should organization adapt monorep or what is the monorep and why should

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organization adapt this? So, and monorepo is using one Git repo or whatever version control system

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you're using and having all your systems in that shared repo, that shared Git repo.

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So, monorepo, well, you can have multiple systems and they can all be deployed from that single

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repo. So, even if you have a microservice architecture or micro-frontends, they can still share

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the same repo and be independently deployed. And that's one confusion that some people

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a misconception they get that if you have microservices or micro-frontends, they have to be in

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different repos. No, that's not the case. It's more matter of organizing the folders and maybe

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using some tooling like NX or Turbo repo, Rush or Learner base. There's a bunch of them.

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So, yeah, so that's a monorepo, having multiple projects or multiple systems in the same Git repo.

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And when you have that, then you have to either make some custom scripts or find some working,

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some tool change that can help you with that. And yeah, it's just a big, I love monorepos,

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but I also have seen in huge systems that it's with hundreds or thousands of developers.

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It's not easy to get them into one repo because they already have dozens or hundreds of repos

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in dozens or hundreds of teams and hundreds or thousands of developers. So, getting them into one

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repo is really hard, unless you did it from the beginning and you kept onto having just this one

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monorepo. I mean, Google, Microsoft has, Google has one monorepo for all their internal systems.

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They have some open source repos. Of course, they are in separate repos, like Angle has a few

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repos, for example, but they are actually synced, every commit is synced into the Google monorepo.

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So, they use their commit from their open source repo in their internal monorepo in Google, as an

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example, Microsoft has not one monorepo, but a few, for example, one for office, one for windows,

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and so on. Okay. Yeah, I think for my understanding, how did we, when we have one,

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it's called it all be, I think it's also hard, not thousands of the developers, but hundreds or

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10 of the developers, it's called be complicated. How can we handle this, that we get a result? And then,

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I think when I have all the monorepo, then one due to makes an epic failure, and nothing, nothing

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runs again, I use the, yeah, and you're touching on something important here. It's usually not the

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tooling, the developer experience, or the development tool, that's the problem. It's usually people,

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people having to interact with each other and manage their dependencies between the teams,

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and whether you're in multiple repos or in a monorepo in a shared code base, there will be problems.

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And, and going into separate repos doesn't solve the problems. It just manages them in another way,

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because now, you can't, another team can't contribute to your code, so they have to talk to you

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and make change requests. Can you change this? I depend on that. And so on. Okay, so how do we test that

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in your repo? We're in separate repos. Now we have to spin up an environment that apply both our

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code bases and see if it breaks. Whereas in a monorepo, you can usually run the multiple systems,

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even locally, or more easily added to a pre-u environment, because you have all the code available

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in just one repo. But as I said before, it's not, it's not easy to move many, many developers into one

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repo, especially not if they already have many repos. So something new that came in this area is

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actually, as I mentioned, from the NXT. NXT has always been a monorepo toolchain, but they have

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also seen with all these Fortune 500 companies and big enterprises that it's near, near to impossible

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to get many, many repos, many, many developers. You get them into a monorepo. It can be done,

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but even that process is just it's long and hard and you need experts and you need a bunch of

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tooling to make it work. So what they have done is that the next is they have released a new product

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called Polygraph. And that is related to AI in that it's also a meta harness. So it helps your AI

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coding agent set up or manage multiple repos that have dependencies between each other.

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So you can manage multiple Git repos in a single session and you can say I want to change this,

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then I want to change it both in the backend repo and the front end repo and this first service

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repo and so on, microservice repo. And it can do all of that. It can run it on your machine.

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I can see how the dependencies go. NX has this concept of a project graph where you can see how

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the projects are interconnected. That used to be in the same code base. Now you get something

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similar in a poly repo set up. So now that's why it's the polygraph because it's the graph for

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poly repos. So you can see how they're connected even though they're not sharing the same code base

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or the same same Git repo. And then it can make your AI coding aided understand that better and

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it has some session recording so that it's you can sort of backs up or logs the sessions you have

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with your AI coding agent and then you can share it with another developer on your team and say can

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you can you continue this session. Here's the whatever key and they could jump in in their AI

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coding agent, open up polygraph and say resume this session and now they're continuing your session

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from your machine on their own machine and they still have they still have this so maybe for this one

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session these two repos or these three repos I set up because they are relevant to the change

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you're making. So now it's like having the environment set up for for the AI. So you already did it

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just by configuring polygraph and now you're sharing it with your colleague. Here's the here's the

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harness for for this change and then you can use that to get it to open multiple pull requests

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in multiple repos on GitHub for example. And then then manage that dependency through the AI

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coding agent. What do you think about that? I have so so so many questions about monoreps but

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let me a little bit unfair and I'm a little bit out of this topic. I see some guys have an X and

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stand on their LinkedIn profile. I never never before heard before we have say we make make this

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podcast. I have googling or as Tetris BT a little bit about an X and I don't know really

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understand what an X is is an X and building system is it a frame where for monoreps or is it a

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developer platform? What is an X? Everything you just said. It has some it has multiple features it

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has grown over years and the product I mentioned before polygraph that's a separate product but also

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from the NX company. They used to be called novel technologies and they're still legally called that

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then they switched their name to NX and the company as well because NX was their primary product

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most of it was was and is open source and then there are some premium features on top of that

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they're called NX Cloud and things like that. So but polygraph is something separate it's a separate

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product it doesn't require NX there's basically not even an NX integration polygraph yet

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I'm sure it will come later on that's a natural fit for these two technologies but just to be

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clear that polygraph is separate you don't need NX to use polygraph if you work in multiple

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repos whether it's open source or in our source or just a big big company many developers many

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repos then and you use AI coding agents then polygraph is is a pretty sweet product and right now

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everything's free because it's it's early stages so you can you just submit a form and then you

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you get access to to use it and use all the features for free for now so and there's no you don't

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have to add anything to the repos to use it it's it's driven via their cloud servers of course if

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if you are in a company you might need to have them have them

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vetted as a vendor they have typed to stock to compliance and certifications and all of that so

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but you might have to go through that vetting process if you're in an enterprise but of course

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that's possible both with NX and polygraph then circling back to what is NX well it it used to be

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mostly about javascript code places whether that's notice bagans or angular react frontens or

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whatever and it was about picking a few technologies not just one of each but a few for example

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react and angular has official integrations in an NX and then testing wise there's just karma

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and vtest and vtest browser so and then so in javascript there's so many tools and they change

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all the time so it's hard to figure out how to set all of that up so basically that's the biggest

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or that used to be the the big benefit of NX that it can integrate all these tools together

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and when new versions arrive NX will have configuration or code migrations that run automatically

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no matter how many projects you have it will upgrade all the projects in your entire code base

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with the configurations for each of these tool chains like testing and linting and and building

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and and compilation all of that so that it was just again something that that's part of a good

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developer experience is not having to worry about how you set up all those different tools

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and and how they integrate together so that's something NX did for you and then on top on top of

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that it has these generators as I said where you can scaffold components or configurations or tests

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or whatever and you can make your own and it has what's called the executors which are

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rappers for different tools so there was an executor for eos lint there was one for just testing

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and so on so basically all your CLI commands had what's called an executor in NX

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which meant that NX could run them for you across all even across hundreds of projects it could run

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all of them so all the tests for example whether it's with locally on CI and you can filter the

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projects based on these metadata project tags and so on today though you don't need this special

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context of a concept of it and an executor anymore NX will also detect the tools you have the

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configurations you have so it's more of a Cyril config or close to Cyril config tool chain now

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whereas before you had to have all these different NX specific things like the executors

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but now it's inferred based on the configuration files and dependencies that are already in your

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project and then adding on top of that is not only about java script anymore there's now official

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support for .net and java, maven and gradle and things like that in NX itself and then on top of that

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there's open source projects for other supporting other programming languages like iphone and go

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things like that so it's at this point it's a what's it called a polyglot tool chain for task

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orchestration and integration of tools and then on top of that comes the one of the premium features

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which is caching so all the commands that you run locally on your CI server like build test

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lent format all of that is can be cached both the files they would produce and the terminal

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output they would produce so if you run tests unit test or n20 test for your big project in your

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code base and it takes several minutes as an example for n20 tests then if the files the test files

414
00:43:03,560 --> 00:43:09,320
and the source code files it touches doesn't change and you run the same command again you get the

415
00:43:09,320 --> 00:43:15,560
immediate cached output of that oh the test is still passing no wonder there was not any code change

416
00:43:15,720 --> 00:43:19,640
but at the same time maybe there was some code change but it was in a separate project

417
00:43:19,640 --> 00:43:23,800
that wasn't there was no dependencies between the projects in your code is even down there when

418
00:43:23,800 --> 00:43:30,280
sync code base nx was intelligent in that they could see there's no imports between the projects

419
00:43:30,280 --> 00:43:36,840
for example there's no dependencies between the projects so we know that this this task is

420
00:43:36,840 --> 00:43:43,080
will get the give the same outcome short of flakiness and test for example but

421
00:43:43,640 --> 00:43:49,400
but in ideal circumstance it should give the same output especially for unit test instead of n20

422
00:43:49,400 --> 00:43:57,160
test and for linked tasks add to on top of that distributed caching or remote caching so now you

423
00:43:57,160 --> 00:44:05,640
can share these cache task task between your team and the CI server or maybe just one way maybe

424
00:44:05,640 --> 00:44:10,920
only the CI server can write these cache entries and then you get to reuse them on your local machine

425
00:44:11,480 --> 00:44:19,080
so if and usually all the the projects have been tested for the latest commit on a branch or in

426
00:44:19,080 --> 00:44:24,680
the PR on the CI server because someone pushed it so that when you go and open the project on that

427
00:44:24,680 --> 00:44:31,080
branch you can get the cached output in milliseconds instead of minutes or hours for running,

428
00:44:31,080 --> 00:44:38,280
testing and linting and building and compilation on top of millions or hundreds of thousands of

429
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:45,800
lines of codes and hundreds of projects so yeah that's that's some of the basic features of nx

430
00:44:45,800 --> 00:44:54,120
and then comes a a i things on top of that so that that was the crash course in nx and the most basic

431
00:44:54,120 --> 00:45:08,200
features for me for understanding how did nx fit into the the the get up I say get up

432
00:45:08,200 --> 00:45:23,080
world from your experience is it um well um in the get up well will which which part of get up I

433
00:45:23,080 --> 00:45:31,720
I think about something specific or open source or yeah open source um this is there is I don't know

434
00:45:32,440 --> 00:45:39,640
I understand it's it's and exist it's the basic it's completely free uh normal

435
00:45:39,640 --> 00:45:47,160
open source yeah open source normally open source companies tell you I don't know uh business

436
00:45:47,160 --> 00:45:55,880
extensions or they sell you consultants or they sell you yeah I don't know so obviously it's

437
00:45:55,880 --> 00:46:03,880
stuff they sell you some add it on slide like the caching uh yeah um what what did you think

438
00:46:03,880 --> 00:46:11,160
um and I think get up it's hyper-microsoft I don't know I think so uh

439
00:46:14,200 --> 00:46:28,280
uh let me uh think about my question uh um uh so well all all the features I just mentioned are

440
00:46:28,280 --> 00:46:36,440
free and open source in nx and then comes on top of that nx cloud and and all the features that are

441
00:46:36,440 --> 00:46:43,640
in nx cloud we I I talked about the caching there used to be free solutions for self hosting the

442
00:46:43,640 --> 00:46:51,480
cache remotely for example in in an amazon s3 bucket or asher blob storage or google cloud storage

443
00:46:51,480 --> 00:46:58,440
that's no longer supported out of the box but it can build your own integration there's an open

444
00:46:58,440 --> 00:47:05,640
API spec if you want to host your own cache server so it's doable but it's not plug in play out of

445
00:47:05,640 --> 00:47:12,680
the box anymore so if you want to remote caching uh you you'll have to pay for nx cloud basically

446
00:47:12,680 --> 00:47:21,160
um and then uh yeah just to mention one thing you how does it fit with open source will open source

447
00:47:21,160 --> 00:47:26,760
projects can get nx cloud for free so they get all the paid features for free if you're an open source

448
00:47:26,760 --> 00:47:34,360
project fill out a form they approve you say here you go here's your license key uh there's a pretty

449
00:47:34,360 --> 00:47:41,480
well-known uh family of projects in the javascript ecosystem called tan stack

450
00:47:41,800 --> 00:47:49,240
and that's uh at this point a huge code page based with many packages going into npm

451
00:47:49,240 --> 00:47:56,120
many developers many different contributors that that uh maintain each of the packages

452
00:47:56,120 --> 00:48:04,520
and they have because of that they have a lot of ci running in github um and then they use the

453
00:48:04,520 --> 00:48:09,080
nx cloud so they get all this caching for free which means they're developers they're open source

454
00:48:09,720 --> 00:48:16,040
developers uh have to spend less time waiting for ci because it's cached in the nx cloud

455
00:48:16,040 --> 00:48:21,960
and then of on top of that there are some features like you can go in and trace

456
00:48:21,960 --> 00:48:29,160
how how much did each step of the ci work flow take and how can you optimize and get some

457
00:48:29,160 --> 00:48:36,520
ai assistance into optimizing your ci pipelines and even if there isn't an error something that fails in

458
00:48:36,520 --> 00:48:45,320
ci you can use what they call ai autofix so the ai will make a suggestion on how to fix the failing

459
00:48:45,320 --> 00:48:53,240
ci task and open a pull request to fix that part of nx cloud also as an example when you have the paid

460
00:48:53,240 --> 00:48:58,680
nx cloud subscription or your open source project that get the free open source license

461
00:48:59,960 --> 00:49:15,400
so it's more um competition to to to github co pilot uh not github co pilot uh but github actions

462
00:49:15,400 --> 00:49:22,520
github as a ci runner uh it is a competitor because they have what they call nx agents and this was

463
00:49:22,520 --> 00:49:28,600
before ai coding agents became a popular thing so maybe the name is not so good now but it's not like

464
00:49:28,600 --> 00:49:35,320
agents hasn't been used a thousand times before for different things in software uh but basically nx

465
00:49:35,320 --> 00:49:42,280
agents is they have ci runners and uh to but to use them you still have to have your github actions

466
00:49:42,280 --> 00:49:47,800
work flow yet you have to start one runner in github and then everything else is delegated to their

467
00:49:47,800 --> 00:49:54,920
ci cloud uh in nx so you just have one job that you start and then it'll delegate tasks and say okay

468
00:49:54,920 --> 00:50:01,000
I need to build these projects I need to link these projects and then it'll connect to the nx cloud

469
00:50:01,000 --> 00:50:06,600
and they will run all those tasks in their ci system which is optimized for speed and caching

470
00:50:06,600 --> 00:50:13,400
and all of that and you will get the result back into your github action stream which means you have

471
00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:20,280
one job and that'll be delegated all the different tasks to to the cloud and setting up that pipeline is

472
00:50:20,280 --> 00:50:28,120
pretty easy you basically tell it I run I want to run run build a lint test and then it figures out

473
00:50:28,120 --> 00:50:36,840
how to delegate that to the cloud so so configuring a workflow in github to use nx cloud nx agents

474
00:50:36,840 --> 00:50:41,400
is pretty easy and there's even a generator for scaffolding that workflow

475
00:50:41,400 --> 00:50:46,680
even works for different providers like github and circle ci and few others

476
00:50:47,640 --> 00:51:01,400
okay uh bar this was so much information my brain takes uh the leads the leads in break um okay um

477
00:51:01,400 --> 00:51:11,800
I think well it's yeah yeah you you asked is it a competitor to co-pilot uh well the the closest

478
00:51:11,800 --> 00:51:19,080
thing there is yes the AI autofix that's also something you can get from claw or from co-pilot or

479
00:51:19,080 --> 00:51:24,760
you can set it up pretty easily or you can get it from i don't know co-crab it maybe so yeah there

480
00:51:24,760 --> 00:51:32,040
are there are lots of competitors in this scene of something broken ci uh AI give me a pull request

481
00:51:32,040 --> 00:51:38,680
to fix or make a commit to fix it right so in that sense yes they are competing co-pilot uh for

482
00:51:38,680 --> 00:51:45,800
that that thing but they're not in a local AI coding agent but the polygraph product I told you about

483
00:51:45,800 --> 00:51:53,560
is a meta harness for any AI coding agent so whether using github co-pilot or cloud code or

484
00:51:53,560 --> 00:52:03,400
codex or jemeni or whatever uh then this polygraph can sit on top of that and help your AI coding agent

485
00:52:03,400 --> 00:52:12,840
set up these different repos uh lock your sessions um and uh give them some agent skills to how to manage

486
00:52:12,840 --> 00:52:19,720
these different repos and how to open pull request for for multiple repos and so on and uh of course

487
00:52:19,720 --> 00:52:26,440
how to navigate between the code in multiple repos within one session usually you have to open up

488
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:32,040
the coding agent in one repo and you cannot reach the code outside of that repo that becomes the sandbox

489
00:52:32,040 --> 00:52:38,200
that becomes what your agent is allowed to see and change but with polygraph now you can work in

490
00:52:38,200 --> 00:52:46,760
multiple repos with one AI coding agent session yeah awesome awesome i think i think a little bit

491
00:52:46,760 --> 00:52:57,480
about it normally i love the theory but uh let's make it more practical uh that's an organization they

492
00:52:57,480 --> 00:53:05,480
have a large uh anics mono repo they have 500 employees or five-front developers

493
00:53:05,480 --> 00:53:15,160
typescript applications front and back and service hundreds of libraries github

494
00:53:15,160 --> 00:53:22,920
github actions playwright Ezra strict architecture rules years of legends code and github code for

495
00:53:22,920 --> 00:53:33,000
full pilot and the leadership says to you we want agent to handle 30% or 50% of routine development

496
00:53:33,000 --> 00:53:40,360
work and in the next i don't know next three months what what will you say

497
00:53:40,360 --> 00:53:49,320
uh well i will say uh it's a good it's good that you have all these tools because that's easy for an

498
00:53:49,320 --> 00:53:57,480
AI coding agent to use they already know anx the tool chain they know how to read the architectural

499
00:53:57,480 --> 00:54:05,880
boundaries they know how to use the anx tasks and the caching um because that's pre-trained knowledge

500
00:54:05,880 --> 00:54:10,920
to the models they know all the popular open source and paid tools otherwise they wouldn't be

501
00:54:10,920 --> 00:54:17,000
very good if they had to learn a new tool every time you open up a session so good thing you already

502
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:24,520
have anx and modern tooling about your legacy code base that's less of a worry because uh of course

503
00:54:24,520 --> 00:54:31,480
your coding agent can't be pre-trained on that uh to do that you would have to fine tune a model

504
00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:35,800
for your specific code base which doesn't really make a lot of sense in most cases

505
00:54:35,800 --> 00:54:42,680
maybe except if you're google or Microsoft with these giant jantic uh monitor repose for windows

506
00:54:42,680 --> 00:54:50,280
and office and everything internal in google um but instead what we can do today of course is

507
00:54:50,280 --> 00:54:58,680
develop our own agent skills for our own code bases so uh something about how does your team

508
00:54:58,680 --> 00:55:04,040
do this and that there's always something that's specific to your team or your code base that can

509
00:55:04,040 --> 00:55:10,760
now be codified into agent skills and agents.md instructions no matter whether you use and

510
00:55:10,760 --> 00:55:17,720
copilot or clock code or something like that so and then the if you say you want them to take

511
00:55:17,720 --> 00:55:28,760
to you to perform or execute 70% of routine tasks that's definitely doable you say routine tasks

512
00:55:28,760 --> 00:55:32,200
i mean what is there something specific you have in mind?

513
00:55:35,080 --> 00:55:41,560
at the end of the day it's a matter of do you want to pay for that? Using AI coding agents on a schedule

514
00:55:41,560 --> 00:55:48,680
is not cheap if you have to pay per token and you run automated tasks every day so for example

515
00:55:48,680 --> 00:55:56,280
if you have an agent that goes and takes maintenance tickets and say you're using github someone

516
00:55:56,280 --> 00:56:02,360
opens a maintenance ticket you need to upgrade your .net framework or your angular framework to new

517
00:56:02,360 --> 00:56:08,760
version and then you want an agent to take that ticket and do it for you that that's possible but

518
00:56:08,760 --> 00:56:15,400
you have to pay for each token spent and that's that's not cheap but if you compare it to having

519
00:56:15,400 --> 00:56:21,560
a developer that does all these maintenance tasks every day or every week or every month then of

520
00:56:21,560 --> 00:56:27,240
course there's there's a financial puzzle that that might make sense and add on top of that that

521
00:56:27,240 --> 00:56:32,600
maintenance is not really for most developers the most satisfying part of the job and that's

522
00:56:32,600 --> 00:56:42,440
part of why it gets done too rarely but also because it's not something that gets prioritized in a

523
00:56:42,440 --> 00:56:48,040
product roadmap there's not an entry in the product roadmap that says update to .net 10

524
00:56:48,040 --> 00:56:53,800
know that that's something the team usually have to take care of using their own policy but then

525
00:56:54,520 --> 00:56:59,080
comes to protocol and says no but we have to build this feature okay I guess we'll post

526
00:56:59,080 --> 00:57:02,920
to post-pone that .net 10 migration for another year

527
00:57:02,920 --> 00:57:14,920
more oh oh this was so many so many information let jump at the end of the podcast in the rapid

528
00:57:14,920 --> 00:57:27,000
fire round so I give a short sentence and you give a short answer so GitHub actions are another

529
00:57:27,000 --> 00:57:31,800
CI system they are the best CI system

530
00:57:38,840 --> 00:57:48,300
GitHub Action question. Playwright or suppress? Playwright.

531
00:57:48,300 --> 00:57:54,540
...co-pilot chat or autoparbij?

532
00:57:54,540 --> 00:58:08,440
Coupilot chat? Do you mean co-pilot agents? - Yeah, yep... I mean, I actually have...

533
00:58:09,000 --> 00:58:15,000
I have a quote on the co-pilot extension product page where I say that I will never

534
00:58:15,000 --> 00:58:21,000
code without co-pilot again because it works so well. It works shockingly well or something like that.

535
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:26,040
That's a few years old and as I said, I was a very early user of co-pilot because I was a

536
00:58:26,040 --> 00:58:35,000
GitHub star. I got early access. I gave early feedback and so on. Now, I rarely write any code by hand.

537
00:58:36,280 --> 00:58:41,560
I'm... I instruct... and I've been doing that for... in open source for more than a year,

538
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:47,000
professionally since November, December. I have barely written a line of code by hand.

539
00:58:47,000 --> 00:58:53,480
So the agents do all the work. Whether it's co-pilot or co-pilot, they're so good that...

540
00:58:53,480 --> 00:59:00,840
that's possible. It's more about how do you review and ensure the quality of the code produced by

541
00:59:01,880 --> 00:59:08,600
the agent, right? So sorry, what was the question? I lost the thread here.

542
00:59:08,600 --> 00:59:15,880
It's a rapid fire rinds, so next turn, it's Karlsbach or Trubork.

543
00:59:15,880 --> 00:59:23,240
Human review or automatic verification?

544
00:59:30,280 --> 00:59:36,040
Okay. Okay. The most underrated type script feature.

545
00:59:36,040 --> 00:59:40,840
Underrated type script feature.

546
00:59:40,840 --> 00:59:50,520
I don't know. I'm more a fan of JavaScript itself and it has all the features you need.

547
00:59:50,520 --> 00:59:52,600
You don't need type script at the end of the day.

548
00:59:52,600 --> 00:59:57,240
Yeah, so yeah, then you lost your war.

549
00:59:57,240 --> 01:00:05,400
That was... was... oh god. I... I... next time I have to do more research before I do the podcast.

550
01:00:05,400 --> 01:00:13,960
Yeah, but for me, it stands out in the conversion with... it's... how the... yeah, how...

551
01:00:14,840 --> 01:00:25,320
architecture, yeah, it's changed from... from the development. It's... so... I don't can...

552
01:00:25,320 --> 01:00:29,480
I don't can bring it in my brain because it's so interesting.

553
01:00:29,480 --> 01:00:37,080
Yeah, normally I ask... who is the negus guest I should invite? It works the secret question,

554
01:00:37,080 --> 01:00:41,240
but as I have you asked another question,

555
01:00:42,920 --> 01:00:51,640
I'm not the divana-pagai, but I meet one for the podcast. So if you like, you can become a host.

556
01:00:51,640 --> 01:00:58,920
You're really welcome. And I think this was so amazing. It was... yeah, it was really amazing.

557
01:00:58,920 --> 01:01:03,880
And for the guests, all the information about last are in the show notes.

558
01:01:03,880 --> 01:01:10,600
And yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. This was... whoa, it was overwhelming for me.

559
01:01:10,920 --> 01:01:19,080
Well, hopefully your listeners got some inspiration as well. They're free to reach out to me.

560
01:01:19,080 --> 01:01:26,200
Find me on LinkedIn, contact me there, for example, or find my email addresses and my GitHub profile.

561
01:01:26,200 --> 01:01:32,840
And if I were to suggest a guest for you, you should talk to my friend, Santo Shiyada,

562
01:01:32,840 --> 01:01:38,440
who is also an open source maintainer, and now he works at CodeRabbit. So there's a lot of

563
01:01:38,440 --> 01:01:42,760
interesting stuff there as well in terms of DevOps and AI and the combination of those two things.

564
01:01:42,760 --> 01:01:49,880
Yeah, then thank you last for staying here with me this hour and yeah, it was amazing.

565
01:01:49,880 --> 01:01:59,240
I learned a lot and I have a lot research to do. Thank you so much for staying with me.

566
01:01:59,240 --> 01:02:03,720
You're welcome.