Don't Make a Human Do What AI Is Amazing At

A weekend camping trip turned into an opportunity for a father to experiment with artificial intelligence (AI) for improving software development. While taking a walk around the campground, he opened T3 and instructed a bot called Nunebot to run a merge operation. Over the course of two days, Nunebot merged 113 pull requests, which was more than he had merged in two decades of doing this work.

The author explained that Nunebot is a prompt, which is a markdown file stored in a private git repository. Nunebot reads the repository and runs a pass over each one in a predetermined order. The bot is designed to perform small, incremental improvements to software, rather than large, complex changes. The author's goal is to automate repetitive tasks and let AI handle what it does best, while he focuses on more strategic work.

Nunebot uses multiple tools to monitor production performance, such as Honeybadger for errors, Flare for performance, and Cloudflare for costs. The prompts ensure that only PRs that are small, valuable, reviewable in minutes, and proveable are merged. The system is designed to break down larger tasks into smaller, manageable pieces, and the codebase is continuously improved by removing unused code.