How do you turn AI coding chaos into a repeatable playbook?

**Ira May** (0:09)
Hi, and welcome to Leaders of Code. We are recording this episode at Snowflake Summit here in San Francisco. If this is your first time tuning in, Leaders of Code is a segment on the Stack Overflow Podcast where we get senior engineering leaders in the room and ask them about the work they're doing, how they go about building great teams, and the biggest challenges that they find themselves staring down right now.
My name is Ira May. I'm the B2B editor at Stack Overflow, and I'm here with Vivek Raghunathan, who is the SVP of engineering at Snowflake. Welcome to the show.

**Vivek Raghunathan** (0:41)
Thank you for having me.

**Ira May** (0:42)
Yeah. How's the week been going for you so far?

**Vivek Raghunathan** (0:45)
It's been incredibly exciting. This is the time of the year where we get to show everyone what we've been up to over the last year. It's just an incredible experience seeing customers interact with and experience the things we've been building. This week gives me great energy going into the rest of the year.
Knowing that we are on the right track, we are building things that will add incredible value to our customers and they share our vision of the future.

**Ira May** (1:09)
Awesome. Speaking about vision of the future, one thing that we've been hearing a ton about this week is about how engineering leadership is shifting.
With the cost of code generation, the cost of writing a line of code just approaching zero, the bottleneck is less about writing code and it starts to shift to more kinds of work around managing and orchestrating teams, defining intent, thinking about what you can do strategically to deliver that real business impact. So I wonder for you and your role at Snowflake, have you really thought differently about what engineering leadership looks like in the light of all these changes?

**Vivek Raghunathan** (1:48)
I think the more interesting question in my mind is also, how is the business of producing software changing by itself? Because at some level, roles and what people do is an outward metric to, how is the business of software resulting in software being produced, right? We have taken a fairly methodical approach to doing this over the last 12, 18, 24 months, and I'm happy to go through it in great detail. The way I think of this is code gets birthed in an engineer's head, then on their workstation or in a cloud workspace of some form, and it goes through a bunch of stuff before it makes its way into main or master, right?

**Ira May** (2:26)
Sure.

**Vivek Raghunathan** (2:26)
I'll call that the inner loop of software. There's the outer loop of software, which is now that code in main has to get released into production. There's what I'd call the second outer loop of software, which is bugs are found in production, and they make their way back into the systems, either through support tickets or incidents or some anomaly detection in our systems and how to fix this in response to those bugs make their way back into main. So I'd say that is like outer loop too, if you will.
And then there is the question you asked, which is how is the roles and responsibilities look like in this new world, or how is the act of building software itself changing, and then how do you structure your organizations in response to the fact that the act of building software is. So I break it up into those five tasks, happy to dive into any one of them, but we're making very methodical progress on each of those five vectors, almost building up to the last vector, which was the question.

**Ira May** (3:21)
Yeah, I'd love to just start at the beginning, if you could unpack it a little bit for us, that would be great.

**Vivek Raghunathan** (3:25)
Happy to do it. I think the inner loop is at some level the easiest because at its core coding agents make it easy for you to write more code and better code faster, right? We started very much with an approach to, you know, Andy Grove once said this, and it's a very popular phrase I guess he reused and thrown around quite a lot now. He said, any platform shift you need to let chaos reign before you reign in the chaos. And so what the approach we took initially was, we're just going to let chaos reign.
Habit formation is hard, habit breaking is hard. We need to encourage people to use coding agents.
We're just going to measure adoption. We're not going to measure lines of code. We're not going to measure PR certain. We're not going to measure any of these metrics that are easily gameable. We're just going to measure, do you use this twice a day? 95% of you use it weekly.