Building a System to Build Code

Episode Summary

Dave and Dan share how they shipped 254 pull requests in 7 days using AI agents Sully and Bodhi — with only about 10 hours of human effort combined. They unpack the key unlock (getting out of the terminal and into Slack), how they accidentally broke their own planning rules and recovered, and how adding metrics and learning loops turned a chaotic experiment into a real production system.

Key Topics

• 254 PRs in 7 days: how autonomous agents maintained 40 PRs/day even on weekends
• Getting out of the terminal — why Slack became the unlock for async AI collaboration
• How two agents with the same model developed different personalities through memory
• Skipping the planning phase, chaos, microservices, and Wednesday night recovery
• Metrics as ground truth: moving from learning loops to hard numbers with PostHog
• What enterprise engineering orgs need to do right now (break your workflows)

Notable Quotes

• "You should be breaking your workflows right now. You should be experimenting. You should not hold on to any legacy workflows."
• "We have two pull requests in the last 20 minutes, and Dan and I are sitting here talking. We did not do anything. It is just our bots out there working."

About The Velocity Lab

Dave O'Dell and Dan McAulay work inside engineering organizations every day helping them ship faster with AI. No hype, no BS — just what's working in the field.

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