October 11, 2024
Read Time: ~9 minutes
<aside> 📌 At Empower, we seek individuals who challenge personal assumptions, value ownership and trust, and strive for excellence to inspire and empower their team. If this article connected with you, join our team!
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<aside> 📎 Empower's engineering team is redefining what it means to use "the best tools" in a world where AI isn’t just a novelty, but a game changer. In his latest post, James Garrett shows how innovative AI tools are transforming on-call support, QA, and code reviews—taking the timeless principles of the Joel Test into the future. Dive in to see how early adoption is turning everyday challenges into competitive advantages.
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/4BzXWq0Mb7lPEW7yWoGjKA?si=609c3bd4a1654d4f
In 2000, Joel Spolsky published his famous "Joel Test" - a simple 12-point checklist for evaluating the quality of a software team. One of the key points was "Do you use the best tools money can buy?" As Joel noted, even minor frustrations from underpowered tools add up, making programmers grumpy (guilty here) and unproductive. In 2025, this principle remains as relevant as ever, but the landscape of "best tools" has dramatically evolved. We’ve seen tools like Rider compete with Visual Studio, Microsoft .NET become platform agnostic allowing developers to use Mac or Windows, and now even more change with the emergence of AI.
At Empower, we've embraced AI not just for code generation (which has been widely discussed), but across our entire development lifecycle. Our CTO and cofounder @Justin Ammerlaan has started an internal AI Ambassadors group. This group consists of at least one person from every aspect of the business— Data Science, Backend, Web, iOS, Android and more. We have been tasked with evaluating a wide range of tools, and more importantly monitoring how AI is being used across teams and sharing those learnings early and often with our own teams to increase adoption.
One example of using the best tools has been our early partnership with Factory , where we served as a beta partner for both their core platform and their Review Droid product. This early adoption and close partnership has allowed us to provided early stage feedback on these tools to better serve our engineering needs, while giving us a head start in integrating AI across our development workflow.
For engineers, of the most impactful ways we've integrated AI is in our on-call incident response process. Almost 100% of engineers will tell you they’re at least slightly nervous when on call, or they’ll lie to you— the outliers are either superhuman or just haven’t been on “that one outage call” which you’ll remember for years to come.
Now, unless it’s a familiar issue, the first thing I do is review our internal run books. If those are not satisfactory, the next step is a prompt such as the following
This has significantly reduced the time to resolution and made both my on-call duties as well as assisting with unblocking release issues less stressful.
Our QA engineers have found a particularly powerful use case: rapid impact analysis of a change and its impact across multiple platforms. Historically our QA team has been challenged with time zones, where a USA developer pushes code and someone working Melbourne, Australia time picks it up for testing. Minor gaps in understanding lead to a 24 hour delay. With Factory, the team is now empowered with prompts such as the following