StaffEng
Conversations with software engineers who have progressed beyond the career level, into Staff levels and beyond. We discuss the areas of work that set Staff-plus level engineers apart from other individual contributors; things like setting technical direction, mentorship and sponsorship, providing engineering perspective to the org, etc.Hosted by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).
StaffEng
How BabyList Accelerated AI Adoption in Engineering with Karynn Ikeda
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David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles)
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Season 2
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Episode 2
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Hosts: Alex Kessinger & David Noël-Ramos
Guest: Karynn Ikeda — Former Engineering Manager → AI Enablement Program Manager at Babylist @ktikeda
Karynn Ikeda shares the full arc of how Babylist adopted AI across its engineering organization — from a six-week Windsurf pilot on a single team, to company-wide Claude Code adoption and a bold initiative to onboard product managers and designers into the codebase. She discusses leadership buy-in, measuring developer sentiment over raw velocity metrics, the shift toward agent orchestration, and why the return of joy and creative empowerment may be the most important signal of all.
Links & References
- Karynn Ikeda (@ktikeda)
- Babylist babylist.com
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's AI Memo (April 2025) Original post on X
- Anthropic Code Review for Claude Code claude.com/blog/code-review
- Claude Code code.claude.com
- Devin (AI coding agent by Cognition) devin.ai
- Cursor cursor.com
- Windsurf windsurf.com
- Lovable (vibe coding tool) lovable.dev
- V0 (by Vercel) v0.dev