How Graphite Ships 🚢
A deep dive into the workings of the team behind one of the most beloved dev tools.
It’s a weird time for engineering teams.
The jury is still out on AI’s true impact on productivity, but at least it feels like it gave everyone permission to question old practices and try new things.
Nothing is sacred anymore, and everyday someone is figuring out something new: inventing workflows, debating how engineers should spend their time, and more.
The result is an incredible diversity.
Some teams are going all-in on AI, others are doubling down on fundamentals. Some are rethinking things entirely, others are skeptical that much has changed at all.
This is all fascinating… and overwhelming.
A lot of the thought leadership out there is necessarily short-lived, and I don’t want to be guilty of that myself, so I want to experiment with doing more of one simple thing: just sit down with leaders of elite engineering teams, and ask them how they work.
Not theory. Just: what do you do, and why?
The goal is to learn from teams that ship great products, fast — and understand how they’re adapting to this moment. What practices are they doubling down on? What are they throwing out the window?
For this first chat, I sat down with Greg Foster, co-founder and CTO of Graphite, a beloved tool that helps engineers ship faster through stacked changes and AI-powered code reviews.
What makes Graphite especially interesting is that they’re an AI dev tool built by devs, for devs. Their engineers use the tool every day. This creates an incredibly tight feedback loop and forces them to be intentional about how they work.
During our chat, Greg shared several practices that stood out — some controversial, some deceptively simple, but all battle-tested:
🚀 High-agency engineers — why Graphite runs with just ~2 PMs for 30 engineers, and how they make it work.
🎲 Onboarding roulette — randomly deleting employee accounts to dogfood their own product.
🏗️ Boring tech == fast shipping — monorepo, single language, Postgres for everything: simple beats clever.
👁️ Code review in the AI era — the vision for AI deciding what needs human review, and how stacking fits in.
🔥 Hard work as a lagging indicator — why the 996 debate misses the point entirely.
Let’s dive in!
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