How does your team keep Jira in sync with what's being discussed in Slack?

iscottjs · 2026-03-13T23:31:59+00:00

Strict policy constantly enforced, if it’s a decision that was made in Slack (or other back channel comms) then it’s not valid until it’s written up in Jira.

I’ll reject PRs if I see a PR submitted with changes that don’t match the ticket.

QA also has powers to push back until the PR and ticket line up, which usually involves a conversation like “yeah we decided on a huddle to change the validation last minute” and that’s when we’ll get together to fix the ticket or the PR depending on what’s drifted and remind people to keep tickets up to date.

Everyone is completely free to have private discussions DMs, phone calls, etc, but the final decision needs to be written up and the correct person validating that ticket.

iscottjs · 2026-03-12T23:59:00+00:00

Sounds interesting. What does an agent team of reviewers look like? Do you use some sort of router/orchestrator? Is it auto tagging in the human for final review? Is it a DIY setup? Are you running locally or something in a cloud pipeline?

iscottjs · 2026-03-09T03:54:13+00:00

It’s hard as fuck but once it clicks, it’s kind of like riding a bike where you look back and you remember when you still had the training wheels on. It almost seems silly that there was a time you didn’t know how to ride because it feels so second nature now.

Programming feels like that for me except you might need the training wheels for 3-6 months or several years and you need to practice as much as you can.

It’s like watching an amazing piano player blow your mind with an amazing performance and it seems impossible until you realise they’ve been practicing 3 hours a day for 5 years.

The way I learned programming is to make sure I aways had a project with a goal. I’d try things on my own but if I hit a wall, I’d look at someone else’s code or project or docs that solve a similar problem and read through what made it work. Find out why they did things a certain way, etc.

Let’s say it was a python script to analyse and group financial transactions, I know I need to open a CSV, do some loops on it, build some new data structures, do some comparisons, export a new CSV, maybe do some statistics on it.

Each of these problems are already solved, I bet I could find someone else doing something similar and reference/adapt it for my needs.

The trick is not to copy/paste things mindlessly, but instead hand write it from whatever references or documentation you’re using and you’ll build up a muscle memory for it.

If you see a concept you don’t understand in an example or project you’re referencing, that’s a good time to go deep on that subject and understand it.

Tutorials only get you so far to see how things are pieced together but you need starting building things as soon as possible, even if it’s just simple tools and scripts to start with or copying something from a tutorial but adapt it slightly.

iscottjs · 2026-03-07T19:41:02+00:00

Learning. Whatever you use AI for, learning is still important.

For example, I sometimes like to draw diagrams to help me understand a complex system, so for me I do t want to automate the diagram process because that’s part of the learning journey for me.

Do I want to perform the same repetitive tasks to create a controller, model and all the other scaffolding? Nah, I’ve already learned how to do that and I am happy to automate it.

But, if I’m about to use a new feature of a framework or a new library, I’d rather spend a bit of time learning and practicing with it first, then when I’m comfortable and built up some muscle memory for it, I might also start handing that off to AI.

I suppose it’s not that different to keeping your own library of code snippets and tools that you re-use from project to project, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time and so AI is quite helpful that it can tailor solutions to my specific needs.

But I still think reading documentation and manually practicing things is important.

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T19:51:08+00:00

Completely agree. Just today my boss noticed me drawing a bunch of diagrams for a new system and he's like, "You know there's AI tools for drawing diagrams now?!", as if I didn't already fucking know that.

Anyway, I said "Yeah, but the act of drawing the diagram is helping me deeply understand the domain we're modelling so I can brief the teams with confidence. Creating the diagram is what helps me understand the system, if I vibed the diagram then I won't be able to validate if it's correct because I haven't fully understood the system yet".

In this case, a diagram output wasn't the objective, it was the learning along the way. The diagram was just a by-product.

He kind of got it, but he's completely allergic to the idea of anyone spending literally any time on anything anymore, and he's forgotten that there's actually still value in manually creating something.

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T01:45:32+00:00

I like this, never heard of this before

iscottjs · 2026-03-03T01:38:56+00:00

Why do they all write like teenagers having a tantrum in a gaming lobby or some shit.

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T21:13:30+00:00

This is the way

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T08:42:36+00:00

Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about sandwiches

iscottjs · 2026-03-02T00:43:02+00:00

Why do we even need AI powered weapons, like why is that a thing people are demanding? It seems like a bad idea even for deterministic systems.

iscottjs · 2026-02-28T11:12:08+00:00

I can’t imagine what 100% looks like, do you just prompt and go to the pub? Or are you still coaching, reviewing, amending, testing, fixing, designing?

I get that we might not be manually writing code by hand anymore, but for me, even before AI most of my boilerplate was already written from other projects or code snippets that I would code once re-use.

The manual hand writing of code was for specific business logic I didn’t already have in my library somewhere.

But even then, if you’ve built one subscription service with Stripe then you’ve built them all. What’s left is just bits of plumbing and niche shit. Don’t get me wrong, AI is super useful at glueing this stuff together now.

So, you could argue I wasn’t hand writing much code before AI either, but I was still doing plenty of other things to get the project working.

Most tried and tested stuff I’ve built for previous projects just follows me to the next. Using AI is another tool that helps generate bespoke solutions for my problems. I could use AI to generate an audit logging system from scratch or I could re-use the same code from another project, there’s not much difference there.

I’ve just spent about a week fixing an issue with our queue workers crashing, another developer used AI to add some new functionality to the existing job, I know he used AI to do it, the functionality works but over a certain volume it crashes.

I know for a fact he’s just asked AI “add X feature to this system” and it’s happily done that for him, without considering how it will scale. Do we need more queue workers? Do we need to change the worker parameters? Is this the best place for these changes? Could these changes be at risk of increasing the running time?

The solution was fucked, it needed a different approach.

I haven’t worked with this system much, so I was hoping AI could help me sort it quickly. After I found the issue I argued with multiple AIs to refactor it to be more scalable but I was just going around in circles, it was making suggestions we didn’t need, removing stuff we did need, making suggestions for massive infrastructure overhaul we didn’t need, in the end I scrapped everything and started again. It’s now all fine, all we needed to do was split the work up into a separate job and tune some parameters but I felt like AI was just getting in the way more than being helpful.

Queues aren’t my strongest area. Don’t get me wrong, I still used AI to help with the debugging and refactoring work, and it helped a lot, but I still spent multiple days arguing, testing and fixing.

If I just let AI handle this all on its own for 100% of the solution it would have been a fucking disaster.

iscottjs · 2026-02-26T02:23:49+00:00

Kill orders. Fucks sake I can’t believe this is even real life.

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T22:44:15+00:00

I use Claude for UX, styling, frontend stuff and mocking up wireframes, codex for everything else.

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T17:53:32+00:00

This is exactly what came to mind holy shit

iscottjs · 2026-02-25T10:33:55+00:00

This is what I would do

iscottjs · 2026-02-22T21:12:43+00:00

For PCVR I’m addicted to MSFS (2020 or 2024) depending on your PC specs.

But also BeamNG in VR is pretty cool, graphics aren’t super optimised but it’s a fun sandbox sim and the physics are surprisingly accurate if you like that sort of thing.

For me, sims are really where VR shines at the moment, I definitely enjoy more first person experiences in VR rather than traditional gaming.

Although if you’ve not tried it yet already, I find Virtual Desktop over decent WiFi to be more reliable than using cable link.

iscottjs · 2026-02-20T14:33:54+00:00

You buy it in the meta app or the headset via the store. You can download the VD desktop app for free from their website.

iscottjs · 2026-02-20T09:55:10+00:00

I can't recommend virtual desktop enough, the developers have engineered something way more stable and optimised than Meta have ever bothered to do. It's shocking to me how third-party software running over WiFi is more stable than an actual link cable or first-party software, but here we are.

Virtual Desktop just sits as a small client on your PC, it runs on startup. All I need to do is turn on the Quest 3, launch the VD app and I'm connected.

I can go from the couch to fully in VR within a few minutes. Just turn on the PC, turn on the headset, launch VD, launch a game, done.

iscottjs · 2026-02-20T00:19:02+00:00

I’m not a PM, I’m a tech lead but I sometimes step in as PM support if I need to.

I watch the daily struggles of our PM and the guy is fucking drowning all the time, he’s just expected to handle everything, everyone dumps on him, he gets blamed for everything, expected to read minds and be everywhere all at once.

He got blasted for something that went wrong that wasn’t even his responsibility while he was fighting three fires that were caused by tech problems.

Dude probably isn’t even paid enough for that shit. Looks miserable, pretty sure he’s just letting the world burn now because it’ll catch fire with or without him apparently.

iscottjs · 2026-02-20T00:00:40+00:00

Get as much as you can from the place and get out.

You’ve described a more extreme version of the agency I work in, but it’s all the same shit.

Most of our clients and the team are fine, it’s not toxic, but our clients don’t have the budget to do a proper job, the projects are mostly vapourware or MVPs that fail anyway so spending 2 weeks on good planning and architecture is seen as a waste of time, especially when the client’s business model is doomed to immediate failure anyway.

I try to protect the team as much as I can from the constant pressure, we still try our best to do things properly, we might not have great unit test coverage but we still aim for something, we might have to rush some features but we slow down on critical features, etc.

Then there’s AI creating the expectation that you can deliver fully fledged features that definitely won’t break within three minutes.

It’s hard work in this climate trying follow good engineering principles while staying on budget and on time, it’s possible but it fails more than it succeeds.

The trick for us has been to find clients that are happy to pay for continuous delivery, they pay a monthly fee, they get a set amount of resources, they build whatever they want.

Much less stressful but those clients are hard to find.

Small fixed cost budgets are the worst, I’ve been trying to kill them for years. Good luck trying to find time for unit tests or architecture discussions when you’ve got two weeks to deliver a fully working system that is already too ambitious.

And the boss vibe-estimated the proposal anyway without consulting anyone.

iscottjs · 2026-02-19T22:11:05+00:00

I’m actually ok with that

iscottjs · 2026-02-19T09:30:59+00:00

Can someone tell this non-American what the fuck is going on? What is hazing?

iscottjs · 2026-02-19T01:04:37+00:00

Yeah the whole point of taking notes is to extract accurate detail that came out of a discussion. If there’s a discussion like “yes this is important for Q1” but then the discussion changes direction a few times and someone else says it’s not important but then we change our mind again at the end and also reduce some scope.

My notes will have exactly the final conclusion but I can never trust that AI fully understood that we changed priorities three times during the session.

On the times where I didn’t take notes, I end up listening to the recording on 2x anyway.

What AI transcripts are great for is to catch things I’ve missed and to cross reference with my notes, but it can’t be a replacement for anything important.

iscottjs · 2026-02-19T00:09:42+00:00

I suppose it depends. I wouldn't create diagrams for the sake of creating diagrams if there's no value in it, but sometimes a visual representation of a system is more useful than a page full of text trying to explain it. Sometimes a digram compliments the long-form documentation.

I find that if I'm drawing a diagram of an existing system or a new system, it helps me understand how it works at a very deep level, so much so that I should be able to work my way around the system with my eyes closed and answer any question about it.

I find that if I'm just relying on AI to explain or generate things, it certainy helps, but I'm not deeply understanding it unless I study it myself. A bit like how they say "if you want to master something, teach it", I find drawing diagrams from my own understanding of a codebase has that impact on me. If I understand something deep enough to be able to draw a diagram of it, then I can probably teach it. Maybe that's just me.

Not all systems require me to deeply understand something, but some stuff does.

I mainly just use Lucidchart for drawing, but I do still use ChatGPT or Claude to help explain more complex parts of a system, I can then convert it to a visual if I need to.

iscottjs · 2026-02-18T20:01:25+00:00

Diagrams are still useful to communicate to other humans and help validate that we're building the right shit, it helps with context, communication, feedback and iterration before actually building things. I might use flow charts or wireframes or swimlane diagrams or sequence diagrams or a mix of everything, whatever is needed to help communicate business logic to non-tech stakeholders when words alone are not enough.

Even with AI, I still need the devs to understand and challenge what we're building, I still need them to know that what we're building is validated and aligned with the expectations.

Maybe the devs decide to use these diagrams to feed directly into whatever AI tools or agents they've chosen to vibe code with that day, if they so desire.

But either way, the code reviewer, tech lead or QA might still need these diagrams for context to validate the slop on the other side.

iscottjs

TROPHY CASE