The job is changing, so I leaned in

The way we build software is changing faster than any of us planned for. You can feel it in every standup and every PR.

There are two ways to meet that. You can wait for the change to settle and hope your old habits still fit. Or you can lean in before it feels comfortable.

This summer I leaned in.

What leaning in looked like

I’m a contractor on the Walmart frontend, the team behind Walmart’s healthier experience. I stopped treating AI as a chat box and started building around it. Skills instead of one-off prompts. Parallel agents instead of one conversation. Predictable tools for Jira, Slack, PRs and more. Then I made it lean, so every skill runs under a tight token budget.

I measured myself: merged product PRs per month, compared against Walmart’s FTEs. Before, I sat between the 74th and 85th percentile. July dipped to the 57th, while I was learning iOS and learning to build with AI at the same time. In September I hit the 99.95th. Across August and September I averaged about 9× my typical month from the year before.

The change went past my own output. That work became 100+ skills in five bundles, open to my whole team, plus Wibey Fleet, now on the Wibey plugin marketplace for anyone. It got me shipping on Glass iOS and Android, two codebases I had never touched. And I still wrote 178 of the 300 commits in our 263-test production regression suite.

Nobody changes alone

Leaning in is easier when the people around you lean in too.

Saurabh Sagar was the catalyst. He gave me the opportunity to shine, trusting me to execute.
Gabriel Driggs has been on the team since day one and built much of its backend. He also reviewed most of what I shipped once the pace picked up and was the first teammate to contribute to our team skills. Back when this was just an experiment, his encouragement is what kept me at it.
Shyam Pinnipati led our move to GraphQL for insights, brought caching to the application services, and was the second teammate to contribute to our team skills.
Vaibhavya Angadi has always been an essential part of this team. Vaibhavya built multi-program support and bulk consent into the application APIs, the backbone of what the frontend shows.
Ravikant Singh has been hard at work on Sparky while keeping the backend dependable in production.
Rashi Rajpal started the API regression suite and CI gates that keep our releases safe.
Rishika Endal joined us this month on frontend, and we’re glad she’s here.
Afrooz Ansaripour helped secure a one-time token increase while I took on an extra problem with a partner team. I also used it to build our AI tooling, so the whole team can grow as engineers on everyday token budgets in this time of change.

PR count is volume, not impact. The stat I’m proudest of is that teammates have started contributing skills back. That’s the change spreading. The job will keep changing. I’m glad I get to change with this team.