Merrill Lutsky (Co-founder & CEO of Graphite) joins Jay to discuss how AI code generation is breaking traditional development workflows and why code review has become the real bottleneck.

Merrill brings 12 years of engineering experience from Square, Oscar Health, and YC-backed startups, plus insights from building Graphite into the leading code review platform for AI-generated code.

The conversation explores how stacked pull requests - originally designed for thousand-engineer teams at Meta and Google - are now essential for every startup using AI agents that can generate code at unprecedented scale. Graphite combines deterministic workflows (merge queues, reviewer assignment) with their AI review agent "Diamond" that reviews every code change in seconds, handling the 10x increase in code volume from tools like Claude Code and Cursor.

Tune into the full episode to learn how stacked PRs can 10x your AI development workflow and why code review is becoming more important than code generation!

HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00 Intro
2:28 Why code review is the new bottleneck
4:17 Stacked pull requests explained
7:08 How AI agents make every team face thousand-engineer scale problems
8:23 The shift from writing code to reviewing code as the primary engineering job
10:28 Why humans will focus on architecture while AI handles implementation details
12:24 Diamond AI reviewer
13:27 UX changes needed for 10x code generation volume
16:07 Auto-stacking PRs using AI to tell the story of code changes
18:18 Why MCP beats CLI for complex agent workflows
20:25 Tracking AI vs human contributions in Git metadata
23:16 Using AI to analyze contributor patterns
25:25 The evolution from copilot to composer to background agents
28:10 Junior vs senior engineer job prospects in an AI-dominated future
31:02 Agentic vs RAG approaches for code review at scale
34:24 Agent experience design and the bitter lesson for tooling

Connect with Merrill - https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrill-lutsky/

Connect with the Host, Jay Hack - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhack/ or https://x.com/mathemagic1an

Visit https://graphite.dev/ for stacked PR workflows