Angie Jones on Ralphing 25k repos at Block, GPT-5.2 Codex, and CES weirdness

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to another Friday edition of Dev Interrupted, our second one, in fact. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:13)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:15)
And joining us this week is Angie Jones, the VP of Engineering AI Tools and Enablement at Block. And Angie, I'll be honest, we've been dying to get you on the show ever since you and I collaborated on that CoTV episode together, where we worked with Goose to create an app that you didn't interact with in a normal way. It was a ton of fun, dropped back in October. And can you believe that that video is at like half a million views now? It seems like everyone is goosing these days.

**Angie Jones** (0:43)
Oh, for the time, for sure.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:45)
It was a good time. So, you know, this news segment, I thought this would be the perfect time for you to come and join us. So thank you again, Angie, for being here today.

**Angie Jones** (0:53)
Yes, of course. Thanks for having me.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:55)
Amazing. So I want to dive right into our new segment in our dedicated episode now. So a big theme in the past couple of weeks at the top of the year has been how developers have come back from their winter break in a whole new mode of agentic development and how they're taking advantage of it. We actually recently had Jeffrey Huntley, the so-called inventor of the Ralph Wiggum loop on the show last week, to talk about where it came from. We'd actually been covering Jeffrey for the last year on the show and the things he'd been writing about. So when Ralph became more mainstream, it was really exciting to get together with him and see where his head was at. In Jeffrey's work, it also is incorporated partly with Steve Yegge's work on Gas Town, basically taking a whole army of Ralphs to do things for you, and we're discovering all new modalities of engineering there. So Angie, I know you've been following all of this too. I've been following the things that Block has been posting, and Block I think has been really meeting the moment with Goose and making it something that you can Ralph with, and explaining that Ralph is like a technique that carries across so many things, and it's not something that's unique or special to just Cloud Code. So tell us a bit about AI-assisted development at Block and what y'all are focusing on right now.

**Angie Jones** (2:08)
Oh yeah. So we're pretty mature, I would say, in our AI-assisted journey at Block. We have about 95% of our engineers that are actively using these AI tools all the time. They use a little bit of everything. So there's Goose, there's Cloud Code, there's all sorts of other tools. Some work better for mobile, because we're a big shop where we have front-end teams, back-end teams, iOS and Android. And so people get to pick their flavor. And yeah, they're using these tools regularly to do amazing things. When I saw the Gas Town article, I couldn't help but say, oh, let me look at the numbers and see where my folks fall in all of this. And I was really happy to see.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:57)
Now, when you say the numbers, you say the charts, the graph of like one through eight is what you're referring to.

**Angie Jones** (3:03)
You know, because I'm responsible for AI Enablement, I actually can pull the data, you know, from our own engineers to see how they're using AI, right? Which tools are they using?
You know, are they in the IDE? Are they using CLI? Like, what's going on, right? And so that gave me a really good picture of where we were on that Gas Town graphic of stages one through eight. And yeah, most of our folks are about at five. So it's happy we weren't in the top row. We were about at five and six. And I'll tell you, I have, I'll take a step back. I'll come back to that later. But most of the folks are five and six. And then we do have like a very small set that are at like the, we're building our own orchestrator level, or they're using something like beads and things like that, right? So a lot of what got us here, one, I'm going to give credit to the models. The models just got a whole lot better. I don't want to take all the credit. But then, but also we, I started an AI Champions program, and this is 50 engineers from across our business. Each one represents a different repo. And we think repo readiness is a key to a lot of this, and understanding context, engineering techniques and things like that. And so that group, they really went in, I got buy-in from their leads to say, hey, I need 30% of their time to really invest in getting AI and integrated at the repo level. So it's not just individual people benefiting, but an entire team. And that got us really far. So those people are the ones that are like kind of the six, seven stage camp in the Gas Town.