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 overview01:58 - Evolution from stack diffs to AI review07:39 - Diamond: The AI code reviewer explained10:13 - Human vs AI review: Finding the balance11:44 - Engineering challenges of reliable AI review17:38 - Over-generate and prune: A winning strategy24:49 - From RAG to code browser agents28:12 - The bitter lesson of AI engineering30:48 - The future of software engineering37:33 - Is AI over or under-hyped?
