Hi everyone, I’m Matt, founder of Ref (https://ref.tools). Ref is the shared workspace where engineering teams align on what agents should build before code gets written.
Every engineering team is battling the same problem. We call it Velocity Sickness. It's the disconcerting feeling that you're moving fast but not having the impact you expect. It's affecting individuals, teams and especially leaders.
It looks like:
- Too many PRs to merge.
- Brainfry and burnout.
- Engineers running in different directions.
- Critical decisions being made by agents.
The last one is the most dangerous. At its core, software engineering is about two things: (1) what decisions matter for my system? and (2) making those decisions. When you let agents make critical decisions, you lose ownership of your system and product.
You solve these problems with Ref.
The art of modern software engineering is balancing pre-work vs re-work.
Our existing tools jump us straight into implementation and re-work. Ref is a tool for the decision layer and works with all your existing implementation tools and agents.
And because this is hackernews, I want to be super clear: I am NOT saying “never read the code”. Not yet, anyways.
Been spending a lot of time in the re-work phase and then fighting whatever arbitrary assumptions got baked into some early LLM output. Excited to try Ref and congrats on the launch!
Hi everyone, I’m Matt, founder of Ref (https://ref.tools). Ref is the shared workspace where engineering teams align on what agents should build before code gets written.
Every engineering team is battling the same problem. We call it Velocity Sickness. It's the disconcerting feeling that you're moving fast but not having the impact you expect. It's affecting individuals, teams and especially leaders.
It looks like: - Too many PRs to merge. - Brainfry and burnout. - Engineers running in different directions. - Critical decisions being made by agents.
The last one is the most dangerous. At its core, software engineering is about two things: (1) what decisions matter for my system? and (2) making those decisions. When you let agents make critical decisions, you lose ownership of your system and product.
You solve these problems with Ref.
The art of modern software engineering is balancing pre-work vs re-work.
Our existing tools jump us straight into implementation and re-work. Ref is a tool for the decision layer and works with all your existing implementation tools and agents.
And because this is hackernews, I want to be super clear: I am NOT saying “never read the code”. Not yet, anyways.
Been spending a lot of time in the re-work phase and then fighting whatever arbitrary assumptions got baked into some early LLM output. Excited to try Ref and congrats on the launch!
thank you! yeah it's all about the right balance :D
Getting in front of the freight train before it gains momentum is so obvious and yet no one has jumped on that... until now. Very interested!
haha that visual is perfect
I love the fact that we’re starting to think about AI tools being kinder to our brains rather than overwhelming them
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