AI coding assistance tools are mostly talked about in the context of assisting and enhancing an individual contributor's work. However, software delivery is and will remain team work, so you should be looking for ways to create AI team assistants that help create the 10x team, as opposed to a bunch of siloed AI-assisted 10x engineers. Fortunately, recent developments in the tools market are moving us closer to making this a reality. Unblocked is a platform that pulls together all of a team's knowledge sources and integrates them intelligently into team members' tools. And Atlassian's Rovo brings AI into the most widely used team collaboration platform, giving teams new types of search and access to their documentation, in addition to unlocking new ways of automation and software practice support with Rovo agents. While we wait for the market to further evolve in this space, we've been exploring the potential of AI for knowledge amplification and team practice support ourselves: We open-sourced our Haiven team assistant and started gathering learnings with AI assistance for noncoding tasks like requirements analysis.
AI coding assistance tools like GitHub Copilot are currently mostly talked about in the context of assisting and enhancing an individual's work. However, software delivery is and will remain team work, so you should be looking for ways to create AI team assistants to help create the "10x team," as opposed to a bunch of siloed AI-assisted 10x engineers. We've started using a team assistance approach that can increase knowledge amplification, upskilling and alignment through a combination of prompts and knowledge sources. Standardized prompts facilitate the use of agreed-upon best practices in the team context, such as techniques and templates for user story writing or the implementation of practices like threat modeling. In addition to prompts, knowledge sources made available through retrieval-augmented generation provide contextually relevant information from organizational guidelines or industry-specific knowledge bases. This approach gives team members access to the knowledge and resources they need just in time.
